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

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 and features 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 to 100 minutes.

Who won awards?

1st Prize: American Ubiquity – David Sutera
2nd Grand Prize: Space Out – Aidan Fraser
3rd prize: The Incendiary Adventures of a Scientist Gone Mad – Tanner Shay
4th prize: L & R – Jeff Toye
5th prize: Drink the Gloom – Yigit Kalyoncu

Audience Choice: TBA

How do I enter my film?

To submit your movies for 2014, please see our Call for Entries.

(Follow us on Facebook or Twitter, or join the email list).

The 19^th Annual Brainwash Drive-In/Bike-In/Walk-In Festival Program

Music at 8:00pm, Movies at 9:00pm

The first patrons received a free Barf Bag just for showing up!

At Nimby’s: 8410 Amelia Street off 85th Ave., Oakland, CA

All shows broadcast in FM stereo!

Friday July 19^th, 2013

American Ubiquity – David Sutera

(Barf Bag trailer)

We Bought a Ghost – R. & M. Etheridge

When I Met Dottie – The Bum Family

Consignment – Justin Hannah

Bob Hope – Careen Ingle

Car Alarm-B-Gone – Bill Ross

Day of the Spectre – Chris Peters

A Stroll Through the Park An Asbury Symphony – Sage Seb

Space Out – Aidan Fraser

Kayip – Mete Sozer

Saturday July 20^th, 2013

The Can-Cannibals Double Feature (Grindhouse Trailers) – Matthew Ragsdale

Smoked – Jamie DeWolf/Joshua Staley

American Ubiquity – David Sutera

Friday July 26^th, 2013

American Ubiquity – David Sutera

Dust Bunnies – Katarzyna Kochany

Dance of the Books – Lorena Fernandez

Asshole Robot and the Benefits of an Artificial Mind – Eric Caselton

Mirror Lies – Adam Rosenberg

Refugio 115 – Ivan Villamel Sanchez

Blue Sheep Suit – Kevin Lonano

I Am Sorry About What Happened – Jon Kiefer

Drink the Gloom – Yigit Kalyoncu

The Incendiary Adventures of a Scientist Gone Mad! – Tanner Shay

Saturday July 27^th, 2013

Living Canvass – Ronnie Cramer

The road led here – Jennifer Hardacker

Nigga… Nigga… NIGGA! – Michael Blevins

Little House of the Big Cry – Alfred Hernandez

Delusional – Jeremy Scripter

It’s Not Saturday – Martha Pinson

L&R – Jeff Toye

So Far Above Humans They Are – Elizabeth Lawrence/Amanda Stymeist

American Ubiquity – David Sutera

Awards Presentation (w/Jesus Festival Trailer)

RiP Les Blank — A Life Well Lived — 1935-2013. Photo by and via Barbara Traub

This year’s festival in memory of Les Blank – A great example & true inspiration to all moviemakers.

This picture first appeared to promote the First Annual Cacophony Drive-In Short Film Video festival in the San Francisco Chronicle’s “Pink Section” in 1995. It is now the Brainwash Drive-In/Bike-In/Walk-In Movie Festival – showing the movies above, still going 18 years later. Thank you, Les Blank, for such great art – a true measure of a life’s well lived success.

Posted on July 3, 2013 at 10:41 pm by Shelby Toland, filed under Brainwash Movies, The Festival, Top of Brain

Brainwash 2010 Animation

Among this year’s movies, we have a great raft of animation, as in years past. Voltaire’s Demiurge Emesis was also shown at the IndieFest and written up in ASIFA, the Int’l Animation Society newsletter, by Karl Cohen. Demiurge is narrated by Danny Elfman, better known for his fantastic work as the founder of the band Oingo Boingo (in the old days) and on movie soundtracks (including, recently, Milk). Duncan Maddux, our lead in the Brainwash broadcast series, who will MC our shows this year in person, was in Milk and ended up briefly featured on the 2009 Academy Awards.

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!

Posted on July 29, 2010 at 1:42 am by Shelby Toland, filed under Brainwash Movies, Our moviemakers, The Festival

Tags for this entry: animation

Announcing the 16th Annual Brainwash Movie Festival!

Without further ado, here are some images you can use if you’d like to promote the festival. I’d be glad to add something to the press release or to an image for any of our moviemakers, if you’d like.

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!

Posted on July 15, 2010 at 2:10 am by Jason Gohlke, filed under Our moviemakers, The Festival, Top of Brain

Coming soon to a [something] near you…

Is it 2010 already? Oh — it’s March? (Really?)

Only 3 1/2 months to the 16th Annual Brainwash Movie Festival, you say? My, how time has flown.

I’m sure you’ve all got your independent short movies and features all lined up to submit to Brainwash. (You can submit your movies at any time using Withoutabox, but if you want to be truly, madly, stubbornly indie, you’ll have to wait until we fix our credit card authorization form — either that or you can scrawl your entry in crayon on the inside of an empty cereal box. On second thought…)

UPDATE! You can now use the secure credit-card-friendly entry form on our site again, if you don’t want to sign up for Withoutabox.

Our enthusiasm is starting to build for this year’s festival, and we hope yours is too!

Stay tuned on Facebook (now with our own URL, thanks to 100 nice people), and join our very low-volume mailing list — you wouldn’t want to miss anything, would you?

Posted on March 18, 2010 at 12:21 am by Jason Gohlke, filed under Brainwash Movies, The Festival

Tags for this entry: teaser

The winners!

How could we have waited so long to finally announce this? My apologies to the moviemakers who have been waiting to point to this very website to prove that they weren’t just making it up.

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.

Posted on September 16, 2009 at 2:58 am by Jason Gohlke, filed under Award Winners, Brainwash Movies, Brainwash Online, Our moviemakers, Press Here, The Festival

Thank you!!

Thank you to all of our audience members and the moviemakers (those who could make it and those who couldn’t) who made the 2009 festival a success! We really enjoyed ourselves and hope you did too. Special thanks to the folks at the American Steel building for hosting the festival and making everyone feel welcome.

We are proud to announce the 2009 winning movies, and the Audience Choice Survey! Take it if you came to the show…

Posted on August 2, 2009 at 12:27 pm by Jason Gohlke, filed under Brainwash Movies, The Festival, Top of Brain

7/31 & 8/1: 1960 Mandela @ 18th (American Steel building)

July 31st and August 1st will be the 15th Annual Brainwash Bike-in Walk-in Movie Festival [no cars allowed; bring a chair].

For the festival proper on July 31st and August 1st (check out the program), our new venue is the really cool American Steel building on 18th and Mandela in Oakland.
Read More »

Posted on July 19, 2009 at 4:05 am by Jason Gohlke, filed under Brainwash Movies, The Festival

Announcing the 2009 Brainwash Movie Festival Lineup!

We are proud to announce a terrific line-up of short independent movies at this year’s 15th Annual Brainwash Drive-in Bike-in Walk-in Movie Festival, to be held in Oakland on Friday, July 31st and Saturday, August 1st, 2009. [Buy advance tickets on TicketWeb.]

Congratulations to our moviemakers and a sincere thanks to all who submitted their movies! We plan to “hold over” certain other movies submitted this year, including a couple of Very Brainwash Features^TM, for further shows, so stay tuned!

In other words, if your movie did not make the main festival, it may still screen later in the year.

And now the program:
Read More »

Posted on July 14, 2009 at 7:16 pm by Jason Gohlke, filed under Brainwash Movies, Our moviemakers, The Festival

July 18: Brainwash Zombie Night!

This Saturday, July 18th, at 1357 5th Street in Oakland, the Brainwash Movie Festival kicks off the 2009 season with Brainwash Zombie Night!

Featuring:

Feature Presentation Doctor S. Battles the Sex-Crazed Reefer Zombies: The Movie
Shorts Dead Sucks and Dead in the Water

Buy tickets either online or at the gate… and RSVP on Facebook. $9, 9 pm! Fun will be had by all.

If you buy a Brainwash Movie Festival Three Day Pass in advance on TicketWeb, two people can attend the 7/18, 7/31, & 8/1 shows for a total of $30 (that’s almost half off).

Breaking news: Filmmaker Bryan Ortiz will be at the Premiere Party tonight to say a few words about his movie — it’ll be a great opportunity to meet an up and coming young moviemaker!

Posted on July 13, 2009 at 11:07 am by Jason Gohlke, filed under Brainwash Movies, The Festival

Tags for this entry: Dead in the Water, Dead Sucks, Doctor S. Battles the Sex-Crazed Reefer Zombies: The Movie

Brainwash meets Facebook

Brainwash Movies is now on Facebook.

So, if you’re on Facebook, become a fan! It’ll be worth your while. We’ll offer Facebook fans exclusive first access to discounts and announcements about the festival. (It might barely be first, but it’ll still be first.)

Posted on June 16, 2009 at 1:43 am by Jason Gohlke, filed under Brainwash Movies, Brainwash Online

Tags for this entry: facebook, social networking, web 2.0

Some movies we like

Here are trailers for a couple movies that are going to appear in the festival:

MXD MSG: Watch the trailer for MXD MSG on the Breadtruck Films website

Gypsy Crepes: Watch the trailer for Gypsy Crepes on Facebook

We liked these movies a lot! Watch for more links to some of the movies from this year’s upcoming festival.

Posted on May 26, 2009 at 10:40 am by Jason Gohlke, filed under Brainwash Movies, Our moviemakers, Trailers

The 20th Annual Brainwash Movie Festival Call for Entries ----------->>>>>>>>>>>>>> & Announcing the 19th Annual Brainwash Drive-In/Bike-In/Walk-In Movie Festival Winners, 2013!

Who won awards?

How do I enter my film?

(Follow us on Facebook or Twitter, or join the email list).

Brainwash 2010 Animation

Announcing the 16th Annual Brainwash Movie Festival!

Coming soon to a [something] near you…

The winners!

Thank you!!

7/31 & 8/1: 1960 Mandela @ 18th (American Steel building)

Announcing the 2009 Brainwash Movie Festival Lineup!

July 18: Brainwash Zombie Night!

Some movies we like

Brainwash thanks our generous sponsors!

And many thanks to the following contributors — past, present, and future: