Attendees of Thursday night’s Internet Cat Video Film Festival coughed up a collective hairball to watch their favorite feline videos.
Of the 10,000 videos entered for top cat billing, the Walker Arts Center whittled down the selection to 79 videos for cat connoisseurs to purr at.
While having film festival dedicated to cats seems purrfectly ludacris, officials said it was an experiment to see if the private experience of watching online videos could translate to a shared and social experience.
It worked. More than 10,000 sad people (and their cats) showed up to the free event in Minneapolis, Minn., and watched wacky cat videos projected onto a large screen. The festival published a YouTube playlist of the videos shown.
The art center divided the cat videos into different categories ranging from comedy, animated, musical, and documentary. And to further validate the festival’s existence, awards decided by online voters were handed out.
A French-themed cat video, “Henri 2, Paw de Deux,” won the top award, obviously called the Golden Kitty. The two-minute clip, art-house type film is an existential spoof on how hard it is to be a cat. Film creator William Braden was in attendance and posted a picture on Facebook of himself holding the prized award.
But the festival, which was announced in early July, seemingly will never end. Voters can choose from a list on Walker’s website a video they want to win a “Best in Show” award because here, nobody’s a loser. If you want to publicly embarrass yourself, tweet the number of the video, along with the hashtag #catvidfest, before Sept. 7.
Anyway, we should all vote for this monstrosity of a video called “Cat Puke.” I imagine this is how the festival would’ve looked like if you went to it rolling on Molly.
Photo via WillBraden/YouTube
