A room full of people in an old opera house in Maine stood up and applauded a wastewater crew. Alex Wolf Lewis watched from the audience with goosebumps, because the year he spent filming at Portland’s East End plant was, as he describes it, one of the hardest that water district could remember.
Lewis and his co-director are not water people. They arrived as outsiders, by way of a plant tour he gave his wife as a birthday present, and stayed for years. What they found was a workforce with no common path in and almost no way out, people proud enough of the job that they see no reason to talk about it. Unless Something Goes Terribly Wrong is, by their own description, a buddy comedy about poop.
It won the audience award at the Camden International Film Festival. It is still not streaming anywhere, and that is deliberate. Jenny Craft, who edits the journal for South Carolina’s water association, asks Lewis why, and his answer becomes one of the clearest accounts we have heard of how an independent film actually gets paid for.
Friday, September 4, the film comes to Clemson University for one special screening, followed by a live Q&A with Lewis.
The event is open to everyone. Join us. Come experience the film the way it plays best: in a room full of people.
DM us on Instagram, and we’ll reserve you a special seat plus a box of popcorn.
