Unnamed Footage Festival: Five Films

The Unnamed Footage Festival holds a unique place among indie genre film festivals. It was initially conceived to spotlight new works in found footage horror; the subgenre started (in earnest) with the “rediscovered” film shot by the ill-fated filmmakers of THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, and that style has been embraced by many low-budget horror films since. But UFF has expanded their scope to include films that embrace some of the storytelling tactics of those films and expand on their strategies to pursue complex narratives and startling emotion. Films shot with the camera taking a single, fixed perspective; fake documentaries; appropriated footage recut into new sequences that suggest new narratives and pose questions about authorship, privacy, and ownership of the image; more and more movies are being made that confront issues of fantasy and reality in increasingly hybrid and bizarre ways, and UFF continues to cheerfully mutate to embrace them.

Full disclosure: the programmers of UFF are all dear friends, and I even introduced a screening at the festival last year. I follow UFF as not just a fan of low-budget horror and other modes of offbeat filmmaking, but as one invested in the work of my friends and enjoying their programming through the perspective of a friend hip to their tastes and processes. So here, to celebrate their third year in operation, to explore some of the things I find notable about their work, and to give others an “in” on what I find distinctive about the programming, are five of the many things I’m excited to check out at UFF.

(I’m going to have to miss both the opening night screening party at Artists’ Television Access, and the next night’s screening of MANIAC at the Little Roxie, so all of the screenings listed below take place at the Balboa Theatre at the dates and times listed. The full schedule for the festival is here.)

SKYMAN – February 29, 2pm
A man who encountered an extraterrestrial as a boy eagerly awaits the alien’s return, and this documentary captures the days leading up to their expected rendez-vous. I’m excited to see a movie so firmly in UFF’s wheelhouse that abandons horror completely, and I’m moved that Daniel Myrick, one of the directors of THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, is both sticking to the aesthetic of that monumental film and aiming for something humanistic and transcendent. If you’re completely horror-averse but want to attend and support a scrappy independent genre film festival, this is the one you want to go to.

MURDER DEATH KOREATOWN – February 29, 7pm
A young man disappears during his private investigation of a neighbor’s murder, and the footage he shot documenting the larger conspiracy around the crime is assembled by an unseen but dedicated acquaintance. According to the program this was submitted anonymously. I can’t tell if this is a fake with which my friends are gamely playing along: they haven’t told me and I haven’t asked. I accept and embrace the mystery, and brace myself for wherever this takes us.

THE LOCK-IN – February 29, 11pm
The discovery of a pornographic magazine unleashes unspeakable evil among a group of teenagers during an all-night event at their church. Yes, this is an Evangelical found footage horror movie, and it’s quite unlike any other movie I’ve seen. It has the torpor that comes with many movies made by non-professionals, and is too pious to really deliver the gruesomeness you’d expect in a horror film. And so when it does throw a jump-scare at you, the effect is delightful. I was at the screening where programmer Clark Little sprung it on the rest of the team; this is a movie he champions, out of love for the truly-out-there reaches of no-budget cinema (and a little cultural masochism). I suspect the effects of this at the end of a long day of programming, attended by the inebriation of a late-night screening, will be absolutely mindbending, and that Clark’s intro will be one for the ages.

NOROI: THE CURSE – March 1, 12:05pm
UFF gives over a couple of slots of its final day to a celebration of Japanese auteur Koji Shiraishi. I can’t quite recommend A RECORD OF SWEET MURDER screening later Sunday night, but there’s enough artistry and imagination in that one to make me want to see Shiraishi’s earlier work. This one is notably the longest movie in the festival, taking in an abundance of characters and covering a number of different supernatural and psychological horrors in its documentary shot by a disappeared expert in the paranormal.

FRAUD – March 1, 2:15pm
I don’t understand why I enjoy novella-length movies (50-60 minute running times), but I’m delighted that so many of them pepper the UFF schedule. I’m quite keen on this one, in which filmmaker Dean Fleischer-Camp turns YouTube home movie clips shot by a suburban family into a 52-minute anti-capitalist odyssey.

CREPÚSCULO

Doctor Alejandro Mangina is so sick he doesn't want to get well. Specifically, he has encountered old flame Lucia, posing for an art class, shortly before leaving the country and the chance encounter has inflamed his passion for her. These feelings are so intense they awaken a tumescent darkness inside him, a passion not diminished by either his time away or Lucia's marriage to his friend Ricardo.

If Noir City has screened a movie hornier than CREPÚSCULO, I regret having missed it. The movie singlehandedly puts to pasture any notion that black-and-white movies were/are haughty and sexless. In terms of noir history it takes the erotic heat of John Dall's first look at Peggy Cummins in GUN CRAZY or the drum solo from PHANTOM LADY and sustains that energy for 108 bewildering, exhilarating minutes.

But the machine that energy fuels is a delightful and fiery cinematic contraption. Writer/director Julio Bracho's theatrical bona fides are on glorious display, from the shadows that fall over the characters during moments of intensity to the gorgeous poetry of the language: the subtexts come pirouetting gorgeously out of the mouths of the characters, but the beauty of the language keeps us grounded in their emotions. The sensuality of the lead performances keeps us fully engrossed even as the more heady literary fanices unfold: Mangina has just authored a book outlining the psychological disintegration of a single subject, and we get the impression that his book (also called Crepúsculo) is adapting itself before our very eyes. And when the single first-person narration is suddenly taken over by all three participants in a crucial scene it feels like we're leaving the planet.

During her sterling introduction alongside Noir City impresario Eddie Muller, Morelia Film Festival director Daniela Michel noted that Crepúsculo was the favorite Mexican film of the late "man of cinema" Pierre Rissient (which is enough to make me happily, humbly, reassess some of my unfairly stodgy impressions of the man.) Academic questions such as "what qualifies this as film noir?" are promptly forgotten as we feel like we're being absorbed into the warm, lush darkness of an overriding supercinematic consciousness. The invitation from a filmmaker like Bracho to dance is like the moment an irresistible femme fatale winks at us, a seductive shadow that promises rapture even as it shuts out the light. Leaving the cinema after such an engaging and luscious tryst we pull the shadows around us, willing the joy to linger, closing our eyes to trap the darkness, to let twilight linger just a little while longer. That is noir, ice cold and hot as hell.