The Autotracking film festival, promoted by the Barcelona video store VideoInstan, will recover the nostalgia of VHS tapes on April 15 and 16 in Barcelona. The event combines the experience of the video store with the popular home video format of the eighties and nineties, and within the framework of its program eight “forgotten cinema” films that have not been republished in another format or are not available in ‘ streaming’. The choice is made by curators “lovers of the physical format”, among whom are the director of the Sitges Film Festival, Ángel Sala, the Ron Palillo Collective, the ‘youtuber’ Tanatorius Mortalban and the film critics Xavi Sánchez Pons and Javier Vine. All of them have selected the tapes included in the VideoInstan library.
The initiative was presented this Monday and its promoters have stressed that what the festival seeks is to “explore in a positive way the potential of a very specific way of making films”, the result of a historical context in which “creative freedom” both in the realization as in the dubbing produced “authentic rarities” that today would be “unthinkable for any production company”.
On the other hand, the promoters of Autotracking also defend the “ritual elements” that accompany the format, such as “the observation of the cover or the chrome stickers of the tape, the animated logos, announcements and trailers of the beginning of the viewing, or the soundtracks, “which may vary according to the copyright of each country”.
The highlight of this Monday’s presentation has been the projection of a surprise film, but the thickness of the event will be held on April 15 and 16. The projections will begin on Saturday at eleven in the morning and at one in the afternoon there will be a musical vermouth with DJ B0rjaX and Original Soulboy. The last screening will take place at eight thirty at night.
On Sunday the scheme will be similar but the last screening will take place at six in the afternoon, and at eight in the evening there will be a live podcast with Javier Parra and Xavi Sánchez, responsible for the program ¡Estamos vivas!.
Some of the titles that will be exhibited are The Secret of the Inca Empire, by Gianfranco Parollini; ‘What a couple of colleagues’, by John Paragon; John Fasano’s The Jitters; The children of the night, by Tony Randel; Geek (Crazy), by Dean Crow, or The Chase Game, by David A. Prior.
