A couple of short-film fests, featuring the weird, the wonderful and the immensely watch-able, will be happening in the Triangle this month.
Starting tonight, people who like their short films to exhibit that "What was that all about?" vibe can head over to Manbites Dog Theater and attend the first Strange Beauty Film Festival. According to co-organizer and Durham video editor Jim Haverkamp, it's a collection of films, "all of which are strangely beautiful, beautifully strange or some combination thereof."
Haverkamp and his wife, Joyce Ventimiglia, came up with the fest after seeing offbeat shorts at film festivals.
"It seems like there would always be one film that would really stand out from all the rest," he says. "It was, you know, something that we'd talk about and think about days or weeks afterward. And that would be the one film we'd kinda end up saying like, 'Wow, that was like the prize in the Cracker Jack box. It's, like, the one film that really made the whole festival worth it.' And we said, 'Wouldn't it be cool if there was a film festival if every film was that film?'"
Together with Manbites Dog, the couple got the word out and ended up getting 100 submissions from all over the world, programming 46 shorts into the two-day festival. Of course, they also rounded up shorts from North Carolina and Triangle filmmakers, including Nic Beery, Nicole Triche, Phoebe Brush and Monique Velasquez.
Along with the first block of shorts playing this evening, Durham filmmaker and scholar Tom Whiteside will present a show at which two 16-mm projectors will simultaneously show brief clips culled from his collection of films.
Haverkamp is proud of what the festival has assembled.
"One of the cool things about these films, as you're watching them, is they could literally go anywhere," he says. "They're really not following any of the traditional rules. So you might need to be a little adventurous to check it out. But, hopefully, there'll be a lot of those films that, you know, you wake up the next morning and you're still thinking about it - and, maybe, even next month."
You may also be able to find strange beauty (albeit of the inadvertently hilarious kind) when the Found Footage Festival makes a stop over at the Rialto on Thursday night. This roundup of odd and silly video clips - instructional videos, exercise videos, cheesy cartoon clips, dating videos, bizarre stuff with celebrities, etc. - could give people that what-was-that? feel.
It started almost 20 years ago in Wisconsin when Nick Prueher was working at a McDonald's and found a rather hilarious training video for custodians. ("It was, you know, the dictionary definition of so-bad-it's-good," he says.)
Along with his buddy and partner Joe Pickett, Prueher amassed other strange videos, which they wrangled mostly from thrift stores, garage sales or wherever long-lost videos are sold. (No YouTube hunting for this pair - they're old-school VHS purists!)
Says Prueher, "That just got us to thinking that if there are videos that stupid out there collecting dust, there must be more out there waiting to be discovered."
In 2004, the men eventually showed off their collection to a New York theater crowd, and thus the Found Footage Fest was born. It has been enough of a success that the boys could take their video show on the road; they embarked on a U.S. major-city tour starting in September.
Prueher, who used to find odd clips for "Late Show with David Letterman," says that the show has been a smash wherever it landed. "Also," he says, "the bonus for us is that, during the days before the show starts, we try to hit all the local thrift stores and mine whatever city we're in for new material."
You know what they say: Sometimes, there's so much strange beauty in the world, you feel like you can't take it.
