The Contestant
2025 · 14m · United States
Directed by Patrick Bresnan
Genres: comedy, documentary
An archival short built from Mini VHS footage of young Patrick Bresnan winning a 1996 San Francisco contest for a Baywatch set visit, edited with humour in 2025.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A found-footage gag stretched thin—the joke is basically 'look at '90s kid Patrick on Mini VHS,' which lands once and then just sits there. The 2025 edit should be doing something weirder with the temporal gap, but instead it just vibes.
A playful riff on archival cinema and nostalgia that understands its debt to the YouTube-era remix tradition; the formal choice to let the degraded video speak for itself shows restraint, though one wishes the conceptual ambition matched the tonal lightness.
The decision to keep the Mini VHS compression and color shift untouched—letting the format itself do the aging work instead of artificially degrading or color-correcting—is what makes this breathe; that single restraint turns a home video into something genuinely strange.