Brainwash Movie Festival has spent 32 years keeping cinema weird
There are film festivals built around premieres, red carpets and industry dealmaking. And then there’s the Brainwash Movie Festival, which has spent more than three decades championing something considerably stranger: weird, unusual and seriously good movies that might otherwise struggle to find a screen.
Now in its 32nd year, the Bay Area festival returned in September 2026 with another wildly eclectic program of shorts, experimental films, animation, music and work that refuses to fit neatly into conventional festival categories.
Brainwash describes what it screens as the “weird, unusual and significantly great (but, probably, unheralded) movies of the world.”
After September screenings in San Francisco, the festival’s 2026 season continues with another weekend of live shows in Oakland this November.
32 years of doing things differently
The 32nd Annual Brainwash Movie Festival kicked off its live season at The Boxshop, 951 Hudson Avenue in San Francisco, with screenings on September 25 and 26.
And if you want to understand Brainwash, look at the program.
Friday brought together Dan McHale’s Externalities, José Crúzio and Martin Gerigk’s I Was Here, Marco Santos’ Kind Procedures, Jiaxin Zheng’s Couch Ghosts and Clint Calvert and Caleb Johnson’s Limited Slip.
The program continued with Black Shoe Polish Gerry Fialka and Tyler Bartram’s Mainline My Funk, Susan Weiss’ Lia: Body of Work and Torsten Lang and Michael Durden’s INVISIBLE WOUNDS.
Then came the evening’s longest work: Liana Vrajitoru Andreasen’s 37-minute-and-40-second Only Yesterday Has a Name, followed by Michael Edwards’ The Eye In Nothing.
Short films actually get to be short
Saturday’s lineup demonstrated just how broad Brainwash’s definition of a movie can be.
Martin Gerigk’s Spheres runs 5:52. Susan Weiss’ Hello Susan clocks in at just 1:48. Yasmin Mawaz-Khan’s Corpo Organico runs 5:21, while John Akre’s Can This Be Reel? lasts 4:01. Andrew Bateman’s Go Down Diller, meanwhile, stretches to 22:59.
That freedom continues throughout the program.
There’s Alex Hecht’s The Evil DuckBot, Hellen Rose’s Gilded Gutter, Gary Beeber’s Mona, Monte Lately’s Boxed In and the Black Shoe Polish collaboration R Funk.
The final stretch includes Dante Rustav’s And Then There Was Silence, Michael Edwards’ Living Geometry, Nilram Ranjbar’s 1:43 Immigrant and Ron Campbell and Katarina Fink’s The Haunted Saxophone.
And then there is perhaps the title of the festival: Dave Reda’s Rosemary’s Baby On Maury.
The San Francisco program closes with Mark McGothigan and Brainwash’s Dave Krzysik’s Angel Island.
A home for movies that don’t fit
The point isn’t simply that Brainwash programs unusual films. It’s that the festival appears comfortable letting those films remain unusual.
A 77-second movie can sit beside a 37-minute film. Filmmakers don’t have to squeeze everything into the same runtime, genre or commercial mold.
That matters in an independent film ecosystem where filmmakers can spend almost as much time thinking about festival strategy as they do about filmmaking.
Brainwash offers something refreshingly different: a festival whose identity is built around the stuff that doesn’t necessarily belong anywhere else.
And somehow, that experiment has lasted more than three decades.
The 2026 call for entries has closed
Brainwash heavily promoted its 2026 call for entries, including submissions through Cinelot, with discounted entry fees of $25 for shorts and $60 for features.
But filmmakers looking at Brainwash now should note the important bit: the advertised extended submission deadline was September 12, 2026.
In other words, the 2026 submission window has passed.
What hasn’t finished is the festival itself.
Brainwash heads to Oakland
Following the September San Francisco screenings, Brainwash’s 2026 season continues at PDE Studios, 2253 Poplar Street in Oakland, with shows scheduled for Friday, November 13 and Saturday, November 14, 2026.
Both shows are scheduled to begin at 8 p.m.
Brainwash is also expanding beyond the traditional physical screening model by incorporating online viewing — an interesting development for a festival whose identity was forged through decades of decidedly grassroots exhibition.
Weird cinema still needs somewhere to live
Thirty-two years is an extraordinary lifespan for an independent film festival, particularly one built around movies existing outside the obvious commercial mainstream.
Brainwash hasn’t survived by sanding down those edges.
The weirdness is the proposition.
Its 2026 submission window may be closed, but another weekend of Brainwash remains ahead in Oakland this November — and after more than three decades of finding homes for movies that don’t quite belong anywhere else, the festival is still doing exactly what its name promises.
Relevant links
Brainwash Movies: http://www.brainwashm.com
Brainwash Movies Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/brainwash.movies
2026 Oakland screenings: PDE Studios, 2253 Poplar Street, Oakland — November 13–14, 2026
