Winners Of The 2018 Drunken Film Fest Oakland

This year marks the Drunken Film Fest’s inaugural trip stateside, following three years of programming in Bradford, England. The festival, programming exclusively short films shown in six Oakland bars over six Oakland nights, was an attempt to remove the film festival from its high society trimmings, making it accessible to all (of drinking age). Below are the winners in each category, chosen by a jury of eight judges.

Best Music Video: Scraper Bikes – “Mobbin”

“Mobbin,” a Deandre Forks music video for Scraper Bike Team member and appointed king Baybe Champ, lives up to its succinct title and the team’s mission statement: empowering urban youth living in underserved communities through self-expression and creativity. The film, which spans nearly three minutes, is a testament to the community of bike riders as well as the bike itself — each bike decorated seemingly as an extension of its rider’s identity.

Their ethos “we stay mobbin” is repeated as they ride through the streets of Oakland and hang out on the steps of downtown’s Rene C. Davidson Courthouse, sunstreaks washing the lens. Watching the video, I can’t help but feel like a driver of one of the many automobiles they pass by, looking out at a group that’s together, having a helluva lot more fun than me.

Best Documentary: A Friendship in Tow/Toe

Winner of the Best Documentary category, A Friendship in Tow/Toe, is a ten-minute documentary taking place across a singular shot of two people taking things step by step, literally. The film, by Atsushi Kuwayama, is shot from atop a large staircase in Lisbon and views the director helping an elderly Portuguese woman up the steps.

The director said he saw the woman climb the stairs every evening and gradually started to walk up the stairs together. Their interaction is funny, as the woman talks about making him her seventh husband so she can slice his head off, while he struggles to understand what she’s saying with a limited Portuguese accent. Besides the charm of their chemistry, the film becomes a look at how the urban landscape, which slows down the old woman, makes way for such interactions between unlikely friends.

Best Avant-Garde: inactivity

inactivity, from Los Angeles-based visual artist Ryan Wicks, is about the quickest two minutes viewers are likely to spend. Not only is his net-art continually entertaining, the images move at a rapid pace.

A chunk of inactivity is navigating a retro Windows screensaver maze overlaid with a hypnotic wheel of kitschy consumer food products, before suddenly cutting to stock footage of a cow farm. “We are going to raise animals and kill them,” is heard over the film. This cut marks a break from the electronic collage that came before it, playing on the stark differences between the virtual spaces we navigate and the analog world outside it. The farm footage dissolves behind a large image of a quarter. To intellectualize what this suggests would inevitably sound trite, but Wicks’ film plays more towards the satire of Tim & Eric rather than anything didactic.

Best Local Animation: Agape

Kat Pongtornpipat’s Agape, an animated short about a woman who hosts a first date of a fellow member of an online dating service, may look sweet, but ends sour. Clocking in at just under three minutes, it plays like a hyper-abridged hybrid of You’ve Got Mail and Little Shop of Horrors.

It’s a piece of 2D animation that recalls ‘90s Cartoon Network fare, and particularly, some fun gross-out images during the dinner scene that break from the 2D mold — a move that calls to mind Adult Swim’s early 2000s cottage industry of experimental short-form comedy. Though the influences are clear, Pongtornpipat’s film is loaded with its own loving details.

Best U.S. Narrative: Caroline

Caroline, a twelve-minute fictional film from Logan George and Celine Held, is the most outright heavy of the winning bunch of films. It traffics in social realism and exists in a milieu similar to last year’s The Florida Project: a single mother of multiple children who’s struggling to simultaneously make ends meet and make the best choices for her children.

The film is essentially one scene with an incredible emotional crux: the mother has a job interview in the dead of summer and tries to attend it while her young kids stay seated outside in her minivan. As a couple discover the children, tension mounts and the viewer’s sympathies are brilliantly split down three avenues: the mother, the children and the helpful strangers.

Best World Narrative: The Things You Think I’m Thinking

Canadian-based director Sherren Lee’s quarter-hour fictional narrative The Things You Think I’m Thinking might be lighter than Caroline due to its few darkly comic remarks, but it still packs quite a punch as we sit through the tension of an awkward first date between a burn-survivor with limited upper-body ability and the able-bodied man he invites back to his place.

Empathy is cultivated in both characters as the former character makes almost all the wrong moves struggling to be intimate with his first post-burn date, and the latter is understanding enough to deal with the punches in a lovingly humanistic manner.

Best Animation: The Burden

Niki Lindroth von Bahr’s animated musical, The Burden, while it probably has the most in common with Wicks’ inactivity among the selected winners due to similar concerns of life under capitalism, is a film of singular vision.

Tied together with one overarching, multi-part song, we visit unusual hotel dwellers and employees of a call center, supermarket and a burger joint, viewers are treated to poignant yearns for the titular burden to be lifted. In its most transcendent, climactic moment, it ties them all together as they sing in unison, hopeful of the day they can enjoy life. The Swedish native’s animated models, melody and script coalesce in a wonderfully articulated denouement of existential crisis.

You can watch some of these winners on the Drunken Film Fest website.