Who won awards?

1st Prize: Secret of Goat – Park Bench – A Woman and a Man live in a cabin in the woods. They are in love. One autumn they buy a goat. Something starts happening to the Woman and Man, they begin to change… and so does their love.

2nd Grand Prize: Odokuro – Aurelio Voltaire – The skeleton of a rat-monkey comes to life in a room full of cursed objects in this Gothic tale with a sci-fi twist.  Narrated by electro-Goth, New Wave icon, Gary Numan, who did “Cars” (what could be more appropriate for a drive-in movie festival?).

3rd prize: Statue  – Olga Wilhelmine - A lonely, ‘living-statue’ street performer in the French Quarter of New Orleans tries to win the heart of a nearby street musician. Check out 219 Records for more of Olga’s many excellent projects.

4th prize: Another Dress, Another Button – Lyn Elliot -  The spare buttons have a field day on the dresser top. The spare button saver talks about why she does it, and how it makes her feel.  A stop-motion animation that explores the plight of the spare buttons: carefully saved, but never used.

5th prize: Trailer Park Jesus – Sean Gerowin – Inspired by a true misadventure, a college student bargains his way home with a sheet of acid as he becomes stranded at a trailer park in rural Mississippi. Another remarkable award winner this year from Louisiana (the other LA). Reviews.

Audience Choice: Doctor Glamour – AndrewJones – A genius scientist contacts another dimension to save the woman he loves, summoning a flamboyant rock n’ roll superhero. (Note: Brainwash fans may remember the excellent movie “Frank DanCoolo: Paranormal Drug Dealer“, also by Andrew Jones, from our 2010 festival).

Greetings Brainwashers,

Allow me to introduce myself: my name is Bekah Barnett, the Urban Minstrel, and I am really looking forward to playing for you at this year’s Brainwash Movie Festival. I find it pretty appropriate because I have been told on multiple occasions that my music tends to be cinematic in feel and scope. My songs vary widely and range from humorous and upbeat to mournful and haunting and everything in between. I even have a song that is about Amelia Earhart.

I studied Classical and Operatic Voice at Mills College (class of 2002) and also started writing songs during that time. I have been writing songs for over ten years and performing them at venues in the Bay Area such as The Freight and Salvage, The Hotel Utah, and The Bazaar Cafe. I recently completed a very successful collaborative show at The East Bay Media Center with a local cellist, and I am pretty sure I’ll be able to convince him to join me on one or more days of the festival.

People often ask me about the process of writing songs. For me, songs are like journal entries, they are just natural byproducts of my life. Each one brings to life a different moment or mood that struck me at a particular time. My style has been described as Tori Amos meets Leonard Cohen, and I have also been compared to Regina Spektor, Joni Mitchell, Fiona Apple, Laura Nero, and Dar Williams to name a few.

I am honored to be a part of the 2012 Brainwash Movie Festival, and I look forward to seeing you all there.

Best,
Bekah

“A candle loses nothing by lighting another candle.”

Brainwash Drive-in Bike-in Walk-in Movie Festival Returns, Bigger, Better, and Weirder

18th Annual Festival on 9/15, 9/21-9/23 in Oakland to feature feature and short movies, live video and entertainment, food trucks, and more

The New York Times says the Brainwash Movie Festival “pirat[es] a piece of that old Hollywood magic and challeng[es] conventions on the role of public space in the process.” (“Now Playing, a Digital Brigadoon,” 7/29/04, Chris Thompson)

“We project movies onto a tarp in West Oakland,” counters festival director Shelby Toland.

Continues in 2012: The 18th annual festival kicks off on September 15th at 8 pm with popular local food trucks, music by Bekah Barnett, urban minstrel and Head Trip, John Law & Flecher Fleudujon’s adventure doc(?) about a cruise with the Cyclecide bus hauling three Doggie Diner Dogheads across country from San Francisco to New York City, preceded by the short movie Surviving Your Bear Attack. Movies start at 9pm.

On September 21st and 22nd, food vendors will open for business and Bekah will start singing at 1357 5th St. starting at 8 pm, and each unique 90 minute show of original short movies will start at 9 pm. In addition, Sunday, 9/23 features, of course, an all-show tribute to Jesus, starting with our own Jesus Festival Trailer, followed by the short Loaded Paradise and a remarkable feature from Louisiana (the other LA) Trailer Park Jesus, movies and food only both starting at 8pm. You won’t want to miss it!

“Brainwash has a great mix of original humor, experimental art movies, innovative animation, and short live-action stories with high production values, and some new surprises in 2012,” notes 2011 festival judge Jason Gohlke. “The moviemakers are unique and skillful storytellers. You don’t want to miss Brainwash this year.”

Advance tickets will be just $10 per person per night OR $50 for a Festival Pass for Two, which gets two people into all four nights of the festival (four nights for just about the price of two). Buy advance tickets at http://www.ticketweb.com/snl/EventListings.action?orgId=16986 or at the gate for $12.

Flash your City CarShare fob or come in a City CarShare car and pay just $9 or $12 for two at the gate.

This year the festival returns to 1357 5th St (Mandela Village Arts Center), which means intrepid moviegoers can drive in, bike in, walk in, or take BART in to the festival. The movies will be projected on an outdoor screen, and the soundtrack will be available through your FM stereo (as well as played on amplifiers). “It’s a lot of fun, or my name isn’t Shelby Toland,” claims Toland. “Also, bring your favorite chair!”

For more info, visit us on Facebook at http://facebook.com/brainwash.movies and on Twitter at http://twitter.com/BrainwashM.

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.

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!

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!

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!