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.

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:

Of Frogs and Gods is another allegorical piece; this one is set in a frog pond. The unexpected arrival of objects from the sky ends up creating societal divisions that have perhaps predictable consequences. It’s fun and serious at the same time. Check out the movie’s Facebook page here.

We are proud to present Clean is Good, an experimental non-narrative short film out of Mexico. It’s an amazingly intricate animated short, with many creative combinations of drawing and live-action shots. It’s hard to describe — just watch the trailer here:

Finally, we are screening Spirit of the Bluebird, another innovative animated short, which uses stop-action footage of paintings on a fence and garage. Artist Jesse Gouchey paints a large scale animation of a bluebird in flight as a remembrance for Aboriginal mother and grandmother Gloria Black Plume, a 1999 murder victim. The beauty and freedom of the bluebird’s motion is contrasted with remembrances of Gloria’s surviving family members, who give an emotional glimpse of a woman lost to violence and the injustice of the legal system. Here’s the trailer:

Check out our program to find out which nights these great shorts are screening. If you’re an animation fan, buy tickets today!

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!

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!

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!

• 1st prize: With Anchovies… Without Mamma by Thomas Justino
• 2nd Grand Prize: Way To Go, Christine! by Mark Thimijian
• 3rd prize: Goodnight, Harvey by Josh Self and Orlando Rivera II (IFYW)
• 4th prize: The Horror of Our Love: A Short Film by Dave Reda (Elftwin Films)
• 5th prize: Signatures by Matthew McKenna
• 6th prize: What Alex Understands by Sebastian Jones

Congratulations!

We’re screening a full-length feature called “Dynamite Swine” (facebook) by Mark Poisella, a rollicking action movie/buddy flick/poker movie that defies description but just works. This is the second year in a row we’ve opened with a feature film, and you seriously won’t see anything like this anywhere else.

We are preceding it with one of the best shorts I’ve ever seen (and I don’t say that lightly), “With Anchovies… Without Mamma” (facebook, trailer, website) an amazing mockumentary (by Brooklyn’s Thomas Justino) about pizza and revenge.

The moviemakers describe it as “an investigative look at love, loss, pizza and the depth of circumstance.” Whatever that means, it is incredibly tight — the acting and script are terrific, it’s hilariously funny, and it keeps you entertained until the only thing left in the box is a grease stain and that little plastic table. Want mustaches? It’s got mustaches, and people who sound like they’re from Jersey.

Anyway, I’m just babbling now, but you’ll really enjoy opening night TONIGHT, Saturday, August 7th. Don’t forget, it’s the Brainwash *Drive-in Bike-in Walk-in* Movie Festival, so you can come in on two wheels or four — or, just use the very convenient West Oakland BART station (less than a block away).

Buy tickets at TicketWeb and RSVP on Facebook.

Other animation to be shown includes:

• Sunset to Sunset by Kent Hayward, about a walk across LA (that’s right – a WALK in LA!)
• and the aforementioned Demiurge, both Friday night, Aug. 13th.

On Saturday, Aug. 14th, even more great animation includes:

• The fantastic The Magnitude of the Continental Divides by Christopher Coleman;
• Phillip the Safety Egg by Mike Owens (looks straight out of Adult Swim);
• The Empress by Lyle Pisio (an Absolute MUST SEE for all animation connoisseurs);
• Billionaire by Antonio Figueroa, about a game cataloging the roots of our economic collapse;
• Frank DanCoolo: Paranormal Drug Dealer by Andrew Jones, not an animated movie per se, but featuring notable CGI while Frank and the world’s best reporter, Holly Malone, hallucinate;
• and finally Goodnight Harvey, with some animation bidding a less than fond farewell to a formerly beloved childhood Muppets — sorry, “Muppos” — icon.

So bring a friend, bring a chair to enjoy the movies and see you there!

The show will be August 7th, 13th, and 14th at the Mandela Village Arts Center, 1357 5th St., in Oakland, 9 pm each night, $10 each. Find out more about the festival!

1st Prize: “MXD MSG” by Jeffrey Durkin
2nd GRAND Prize: “Mister Coffey” by Mark Thimijan
3rd Prize: “EXIT:ALLEY” by Robin Smyth
4th Prize: “The Collection” by Keren Albala
5th Prize: “Gypsy Crepes” by Count Lear Bunda
Brainwash First Feature: “Dr. S Battles the Sex-Crazed Reefer Zombies: The Movie” by Bryan Ortiz
Audience Choice Award: “Stalk Much?” by Bill Baykan

The last was finally tabulated from the thousands and thousands of paper ballots (chads hanging all over the place) so that you, the loyal reader, would finally know the truth about the 2009 Brainwash Movie Festival.

The truth is, it’s all over, so watch this space for our call for entries! Become a fan on Facebook (not that we’ve done much with that in a while) to keep up. Soon we’ll relaunch our email list as well.