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The Unnamed Footage Festival RECALIBRATION PARTY returns to the ATA for another night of handheld first-person insanity. Usher in the 2020 edition of the festival with a double feature of haunted house handycam fragments in FEAR FOOTAGE 1 & 2. Shot from the perspective a deputy’s bodycam, a child with a home video camera, and storm chasers documenting their hunt, FEAR FOOTAGE 1 presents the audience with a scrap of evidence of unknown horrors. That evidence leads to more of the bizarre in FEAR FOOTAGE 2. When the tapes are mysteriously leaked to the public, thousands are exposed to the horrors. For one man, these video fragments raise an entirely new set of questions that he cannot leave unanswered. The Unnamed Footage Festival is a 4-day Bay Area event dedicated to showcasing rare and underground films in the niche genre of First Person Cinema. This includes found footage horror, first person POV film, and faux-documentary. We open the event every year with a RECALIBRATION PARTY, where we welcome you to join us for a complimentary beer and to get your brain aligned for a weekend of madness.”

Screening at San Francisco Public Library, Noe Valley Branch, 451 jersey street.

In February 1990 Nelson Mandela was finally released from prison after twenty-seven years. We honor the thirtieth anniversary of that event by looking at a remarkable film made in the midst of an apartheid regime in which a minority of whites systematically oppressed and controlled all aspects of life for the Black majority.
Secretly recorded in South Africa by a multi-national team of filmmakers led by Pan-Africanist Congress member and producer Nana Mahomo, this hard-hitting documentary was one of the first films to show the rest of the world just how unequally blacks and whites were treated under  apartheid, and how international corporations and governments were complicit in that system. Statistics were backed up with images of contrasting living conditions for various populations of the country, with particular focus on one especially impoverished township called Dimbaza. In November of year it was released, the United Nations suspended South Africa’s full role in that body over the objections of the United States and the United Kingdom. Dir: Chris Curling & Pascoe Macfarlane, 1974, color, 55 minutes

Artists’ Television Access  (ATA) teams up with SFPL to mine the treasures in the Library’s 16mm film archive. That’s real film, not video!
This screening is part of the Library’s More Than a Month programming.