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.