Brainwash Movie Festival: Drive-in Bike-in Walk-in Film Festival in Oakland, California

Congrats to My Friend Peter – Audience Choice 2011!

My Friend Peter still
Congratulations to the Kopera brothers, makers of the short My Friend Peter, which won the “Audience Choice Award” at this year’s festival!

Written, produced, and starring Mike Kopera, directed by Steve Kopera, and produced by Matt & John Kopera, My Friend Peter is a heartwarming and funny 11-minute short about a man and his monkey puppet. It also received one of the best audience reactions I’d ever seen in six years of Brainwash. Though we are a drive-in festival, a lot of our patrons sit outside their cars, so we are able to hear their reactions… and they were big.

To choose the Audience Choice Award, we handed out ballots as people entered the venue. Members of the audience each wrote down their ratings of each of the movies (0-5 stars), and we tallied them up this week.

My Friend Peter won decisively with an average rating of 4 2/3, but several other movies were also extremely well-received by our audience, including The Lost Samurai, 5 Minutes Each, Spirit of the Bluebird, and Earthship, which all averaged ratings of four stars or more.

Posted on September 13, 2011 at 8:47 pm by Jason Gohlke, filed under Award Winners, Our moviemakers, The Festival, Top of Brain

Tags for this entry: Mike Kopera, monkey puppet, My Friend Peter

Thank you!

Thank you all for making the 17th Annual Brainwash Drive-in Bike-in Walk-in Movie Festival a success! It seemed like the audiences had a good time. It’s late, but I am still posting the award winners:

1st Prize: Clean is Good by Carlos Matiella
2nd Grand Prize: Earthship by David Wilson
3rd prize: Coming Soon by Raji Barbir
4th prize: 5 Minutes Each by Vojin Vasovic
5th prize: The Lost Samurai by Yuta Okamura
Executive Consultant Award: Dave Reda for My Undeadly and Horror of Our Love
Audience Choice: My Friend Peter by Mike Kopera

Congrats to our award winners and to all our moviemakers!

Posted on September 11, 2011 at 1:56 am by Jason Gohlke, filed under Award Winners, Brainwash Movies, The Festival, Top of Brain

Video: More work!

It’s Friday night (Saturday morning, by now). Dave and Simon are doing physical labor, and I am documenting it thusly:

Posted on September 3, 2011 at 12:15 am by Jason Gohlke, filed under Brainwash Movies, The Festival, Trailers

Tags for this entry: festival, film, movies, Screen

Video: That’s dedication.

Okay, here’s what Dave and I were doing at midnight last night to bring you, the Brainwash Drive-in Bike-in Walk-in Movie Festival patron, the best possible drive-in film experience possible.

By the way, this new, thicker vinyl screen is a significant upgrade from last year. Last year we added a new projector and FM transmitter, which worked great! The sound and picture are as clear as Crystal Gravy. Check out last year’s blog entry for details.

Aaaand, I added descriptions of all the movies, so now you can (kind of) understand what you’re getting into!

Posted on September 1, 2011 at 4:46 pm by Jason Gohlke, filed under Brainwash Movies, The Festival, Trailers

Tags for this entry: dedication, silly, teaser, trailer, video

Brainwash loves animation

As long as Brainwash has been around, animated shorts have been a major component of the festival. Following in the footsteps of such illustrious titles as Thought Bubble, Scrimshander, Boxcartoon, The Collection, and far more than I can name here (or, for that matter, remember), several very special, very distinct, and very original animated shorts are part of the program on September 9th and 10th.

Animation is a perfect medium for allegory, fables, and metaphors. Animation makes it a lot easier to portray animals and inanimate objects doing human things, or other really far-out ideas, than live action. Five Minutes Each, screening September 9th, is a classic allegorical tale. The plight of the artist, as some of Brainwash’s moviemakers are well aware, is a constant struggle to achieve even five minutes in the sun for their unique and individual ideas. Fascinatingly, Five Minutes Each uses the pattern of planned obsolescence of technology as a metaphor for the creative process. Here’s a “Making of” video:

More animated shorts are featured after the jump: Read More »

Posted on August 30, 2011 at 9:43 am by Jason Gohlke, filed under Brainwash Movies, Our moviemakers, The Festival, Trailers

Tags for this entry: animation

“How to Make it in Filmmaking”

Like Gideon Verite, How to Make it in Filmmaking is a movie that will be shown at Brainwash about… well, filmmaking.

There are, however, many differences. How to Make it in Filmmaking (check out the movie site here) is a 59-minute documentary by Shanna Maurizi about a real movie director, while Gideon Verite is a fanciful 19-minute short about a guy who plays a guy who plays a movie director.

The subject of How to Make it in Filmmaking, director Ari Taub, spent ten years making a period-accurate war movie in three languages, on a shoestring budget (or less), in order to get noticed by Hollywood. Shanna’s presentation of Ari’s guerrilla filmmaking style really resonated with us, since we are a kind of guerrilla film festival ourselves. We’re showing Shanna’s movie this Saturday night, 9/3, on the opening night of the festival.

Here’s a trailer:

Speaking of guerrilla filmmaking, prior to that, we are showing the pilot episode of “Big Weird Time,” a show about a certain drive-in bike-in walk-in movie festival and the short films that are featured in it. It is a curiosity that arguably should never have seen the light of day. (Luckily, we filmed it and are showing it at night, so no problem there.) It is also an extremely good excuse to show a couple of our favorites from the 2010 festival, Goodnight Harvey (3rd prize in 2010) and The Horror of Our Love (4th prize). Don’t miss it – buy tickets today!

Posted on August 28, 2011 at 10:11 pm by Jason Gohlke, filed under Big Weird Time, Brainwash Movies, Our moviemakers, The Festival, Trailers

Gideon Verite: one of many great shorts for 2011

The heart of Brainwash is the movies we show. That’s why we call ourselves the world’s only drive-in bike-in walk-in MOVIE festival.

One of this year’s shorts, Gideon Verite by Raquel Cedar, is in the classic Brainwash style. In an absurdist style somewhat reminiscent of Being John Malkovich, Gideon Verite creates an eccentric and theatrical universe where, in the words of the director,

“… the MGM lion is human, the cinematographer a musical conductor of lights, gaffers and grips carry film equipment on their backs like ants, producers wear black leather and are employed by the Mafia, and editing is done sitting on the floor buried in a pile of footage.”

It’s a lot of fun and it anchors our second night, September 9th. Check out the trailer here, then come see it and a whole host of other entertaining movies by up-and-coming moviemakers — buy tickets today!

Posted on August 26, 2011 at 4:48 pm by Jason Gohlke, filed under Brainwash Movies, Our moviemakers, The Festival

Tags for this entry: Gideon Verite, Raquel Cedar

The festival is coming!

Here comes the Brainwash Drive-in Bike-in Walk-in Movie Festival!

When? September 3, 9, and 10, 2011, after dark.

Where? Mandela Village Arts Center, 1357 5th St., Oakland.

We are kicking off the 17th annual festival on September 3rd at 8 pm with movies and food trucks (Taco Oaxaco will be there)! On September 9th and 10th, we will have food vendors (Taco Oaxaco both nights, Guerrilla Grub on Saturday), music (Ben on fiddle and banjo on Friday, and a selection from DJ Steve Mobia on Saturday), starting at 7 pm, and will start each unique 90 minute show of short movies at 9 pm. See you there!

Festival Lineup (larger version or printable PDF)

The movies shown at the Brainwash Movie Festival are a great mix of original humor, experimental art movies, innovative animation, and short live-action stories with high production values. The moviemakers are unique and skillful storytellers, and the movies themselves pack a real punch into anywhere from 5 to 18 minutes.

This year, we will feature a love story set in a post-global warming dystopia, a science-fiction period piece set in 1972, a six-minute Japanese historical epic comedy, and many more. Check out descriptions of all the movies here.

Tickets are $12 per person per night at the gate, but you can buy discount advance tickets today at TicketWeb!

Posted on August 17, 2011 at 1:59 am by Jason Gohlke, filed under The Festival, Top of Brain

Trailer/teaser for 2011

Hey, look… here’s a weird preliminary trailer for 2011!

Share and enjoy!

Posted on August 16, 2011 at 11:26 pm by Harrison Fremont, filed under Brainwash Movies, The Festival, Trailers

Tags for this entry: teaser

The Audience Choice Award goes to…

We are happy to announce that the 2010 Brainwash Drive-in Bike-in Walk-in Movie Festival Audience Choice Award goes to — among several very strong contenders — “Morgue: A Love Story With Guts,” directed by Donald McQuade and written by Anthony Pizzo! Both of them came up from Southern California to see the 21 shorts we showed at the final weekend of the festival. Our congratulations, and thanks to them for submitting their movie and for coming up!

Speaking of which, we were really glad to get a chance to meet and talk to the moviemakers who came to the festival: Mark Poisella, writer and director of the feature “Dynamite Swine”; Jason Rose (director) and Leslie Rose (producer) of “Viola Concerto”; Matthew McKenna, who directed “Signatures”; Josh Self and Orlando Rivera, co-directors and writers of “Goodnight Harvey”; and Karl Schweitzer and Tony Turino, cast and crew of “Horror of Our Love”.

Congratulations again to all of our moviemakers and award winners! See you next year, if not sooner!

Posted on August 30, 2010 at 5:30 pm by Jason Gohlke, filed under Award Winners, Our moviemakers, The Festival, Top of Brain