by Ava Austin
POV: It's a dark March night in San Francisco, and you're stalking the streets of the Outer Richmond district. Something catches your eye: The Balboa movie theater, shrouded in fog (for the sake of the story), with a marquee that reads "UFF." Inside, people crowd around merch tables with frightening, pulpy posters and line up for popcorn.
This is the Unnamed Footage Festival, which declares itself the only exclusively found footage horror festival in the country.
Oksana Osachiy and her husband, Russell Fisher, are founding members of the festival.
"We used to run a blog that was kind of centered around having people watch movies in a group and then talk about them afterwards," Osachiy explained. "It'd be kind of low brow, horror screeners a lot of times, but we would give them more attention than they probably ever got from other screenings."
This was about ten years ago. Then, Osachiy says she and Fisher ran into an organizer for Philadelphia's Unnamed Footage Festival, who encouraged them to expand their community and start their own festival.
"And it was kind of half serious, but I think [Russell] felt confident… It just kind of blossomed from there."
They repurposed the name because they "wanted to show not just found footage movies," but also faux documentaries, analogue horror, POV films, screen life, and include ARG (alternate reality game) events.
The 2026 festival kicked off in late March with a screening of Ti West's The Sacrament (2013), a found footage horror film inspired by the Jonestown Massacre, shown at the Alamo Drafthouse New Mission.
They then jumped over to the Artist's Television Access for a night of police body cam footage and supernatural mystery solving, before finishing their run with four eclectic days at the Balboa Theater.
"[The Balboa] worked with us our first year," Osachiy recalled, "and instead of having to rent it, they let us split ticket sales with them… I don't know how we would have done it otherwise, [as] a very niche festival."
The festival has grown in recent years, though; they had to turn people away from a screening for the first time in 2025. Osachiy says that many of the films which they screened in their first year have since gained popularity, found footage projects including Be my cat: A Film for Anne (2015), Descent into Darkness (2013) and Butterfly Kisses (2018).
Some of the most highly anticipated films from this year pushed the genre in new directions.
Multiple organizers named Big City Pizza (2026) as a favorite from this year's lineup. The unreleased feature shows the POV of a skeleton named Boney as he delivers pizzas around a city on a chaotic night. Animated in a fresh and trippy style, akin to an early 3D video game, the fantastical film qualifies its placement in the festival by placing the audience directly in the shoes of its stressed-out protagonist.
Also eagerly awaited was Florida, Man which is now in its final round of post-production editing by director Evan Jordan. According to Jordan, the intimate film walks the line between documentary and narrative fiction as "an exploration of the ghosts of [his] past… and a hope for a better future," as well as an investigation into the "paranormal history" of his former home in Florida.
The festival hosted the world premiere of This House is Totally Haunted, a film by Bay Area writer/director Sean Nichols Lynch. The comedy horror perfectly encapsulates the traditional side of the genre, a classic found footage film that follows podcasters investigating a cult survivor who lives deep in the woods.
The Unnamed Footage Festival's mission is best explained by their website: "With this event, we want to present to an audience these films as a legitimate cinematic movement, not a mere subgenre of horror. Spanning from shot on video experiments of the early 90s to new unreleased and underseen features, and not focusing specifically on horror, the Unnamed Footage Festival is set on opening a dialogue regarding the entertainment and artistic values of first person narrative filmmaking."
The festival will return in March of next year for its 10th anniversary, where it will continue its exaltation of "in-world camera" cinema. Dates to be announced.
