This year marks the tenth year for the Philadelphia Unnamed Film Festival! PUFF weekend is always a treat, featuring truly independent cinema from all around the world, spanning every genre imaginable. Features, shorts, locally shot curiosities, horror, drama, comedy, music videos, and even experimental oddities. There’s something here for everyone, and plenty of new things for the even the most passive cinephile to discover. In the previous decade of programming, PUFF has done incredible work brining unique gems to the big screen, and the 2025 lineup continues the trend of unmissable cinema that you simply won’t find anywhere else.
Day two of programming featured two films from
Festival alumni, back again to showcase their unique cinematic stylings to Philly’s most discerning cinephiles (well, the coolest cinephiles)
Tinsman Road (dir. Robbie Banfitch)
After changing the found footage game with The Outwaters, Robbie Banfitch is back with Tinsman Road, a less stylistically ambitious, but no less effective found footager that muses on grief and family with a depth not often seen in the subgenre (I talk about this in my review from a few months back).
Seeing this one a second time reveals a level of detail not able to be gleaned from a single viewing. Found footage gets a reputation as a genre employed by filmmakers who wish to make an easy, cheap film, but Banfitch proves that despite the subgenre’s accessibility, there are myriad ways to fill the story with detail and thematic depth. Some living-camera films use the framing device as a crutch, but in the case of Tinsman Road, there’s really no other way this story could’ve been told. The inclusion of the camera is essential.
A post-screening Q&A with two of the lead actresses reveals that this was a quarantine project produced almost entirely among friends and family. It’s the kind of movie that makes you want to make a film … and makes you believe you can. But if you do, take a page from Tinsman Road and make it count: use the accessibility of the form to make your audience feel.
Anything that Moves (dir. Alex Phillips)
Many films receive the stamp of being John Waters-esque, but fans of Waters will agree that few earn the designation in any meaningful way (same goes for “Lynchian”), but for my money, the latest from the weirdo behind All Jacked Up And Full of Worms comes about as close I’ve ever seen. Shot on 16mm, this aggressively erotic, cartoonishly violent comedy/thriller follows Liam, a freelance sex worker who can and will please anyone who pays his high price (and if they can pay via the app, all the better). There’s simply no one who he can’t please, and he’s down for anything, per the film’s title.
Things take a Giallo-ish turn when our hero’s Johns and Janes start turning up dead, putting him into the crosshairs of law enforcement. Liam must employ his sexual prowess to solve the mystery, protect his clients, and continue giving as much erotic pleasure as possible before he’s either locked up or gruesomely dispatched all the same.
God bless Phillips for putting together a legitimate envelope-pusher, and doing so ON FILM. there’s been a movement as of late for the return of puritanical prudishness to film. Adults with the brains of babies are so uncomfortable with onscreen sex that they treat it like some sort of evil from which the rest of the world must be saved. When such anti-art ideals hit the culture, it’s films like this one that keep the squares on their heels.
Even for those of us who seek out this sort of thing, Anything That Moves is a genuinely upsetting piece of bizarro art, but it’s also rather hopeful and quite funny! There’s an open-mindedness that is lovely to behold: just about every permutation of age/gender/body type is represented, and all of them be fuckin’.
Now to be fair, the film functions more as a piece of edgy outsider art than as a compelling narrative in and of itself, so it’s not one to tickle your gray matter in too scholarly sense. It is, however, a powerful cinematic experience when viewed with a game crowd. Make sure to wipe the seat when you’re done.
