A local Sarasota man accidentally submitted a collection of home videos to the Sarasota Film Festival when he mistook SFF offices for those of the South Florida Film company. Depositing near 20 years of private and at times horribly embarrassing family footage via three cardboard boxes of poorly labeled VHS cassettes, the man reported surprise at hearing of his acceptance into this year’s festival program.

“I kinda just figured they’d put them on DVD for me,” said 64-year-old Howard Kelvin, the retired Hewlett-Packard printer technician who inadvertently shattered the trust of friends and family by revealing their most intimate moments to the world. Still, Kelvin says he can see the bright side. “I hadn’t spoken to my daughter in going on 12 years,” he said. “But she called this morning and she had a whole lot to say.”

Clocking in at just under four hours, the film chronicles the slow collapse of an American family, punctuated by regular scenes of a drunken Kelvin repeatedly ruining Christmas and disappointing those around him.

Early screenings have divided critics, with many expressing disappointment at the film’s “amateur direction” and “choppy, at times nonsensical editing.” Kelvin’s life as a husband and father received the harshest criticism, with Peter Travers of Rolling Stone calling the lead’s performance “both the least convincing and most offensive portrayal of blue collar America since Larry The Cable Guy.” Others were either less astute or more visually impaired, with Pitchfork Media dubbing Kelvin’s debut a hallmark of the alternate found footage genre and praising the film for its “bold use of near-constant male nudity as an innovative approach to the ever-fluxed intersectionality of life, art and sex through a lens of male impotence.”

“I’m not sure that’s what I was going for, but that's OK,” said Kelvin, reprising a sad and confused smile reminiscent of the film’s ostensible climax, when Kelvin’s wife reveals that she’s leaving him as her new fiancée records. Said Kelvin, relinquishing his last shred of dignity, “I still want my DVDs."

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