Found Footage Festival at Ciné

This Friday, February 5, the Found Footage Festival will be at Ciné. The festival showcases such odd (and very funny) videos as infomercials, training videos and cable access shows found at garage sales, thrift stores, warehouses and even in dumpsters.

Comedians Joe Pickett and Nick Prueher host the show and tour all over the country. Pickett and Prueher started collecting videotapes in the early 1990s after finding “Inside and Outside Custodial Duties,” a custodial training video, in a McDonald’s break room in Wisconsin. In 2004, the men watched all the videos they had found. After three months and more than 1,000 hours of footage, Pickett and Prueher “found 90 minutes of needles in a thousand haystacks.”

Pickett and Prueher have two simple guidelines for choosing footage:

1)   Footage must be found on physical format. No YouTube.

2)   It has to be unintentionally funny. Whatever it’s trying to do, it has to fail miserably at that.

Four volumes and hundreds of shows later, Joe and Nick are coming to Athens for one night only. The Found Footage Festival will be at Ciné this Friday with two shows, 8 p.m. and 10 p.m. Tickets are $10 in advance.

If you can’t make it to Ciné on Friday, at least check out the Found Footage Web site and watch some of the hilarious video clips. You can also buy DVDs and other merchandise online.