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.
Special Event
On Friday, September 4, we brought the film to Clemson University for a special screening at the McKissick Theatre in the Hendrix Student Center, and the turnout was incredible.
We had a full theater and a record crowd, with students, faculty, water professionals, and members of the community all coming together for the film and a live Q&A with Lewis. It was exactly the kind of experience we hoped for: a big screen, a packed room, great questions, and plenty of conversation afterward.
A huge thank you to the Clemson Student Chapter of AWWA and WEF and the Department of Environmental Engineering and Earth Sciences for hosting the event, along with Goldie Associates and Black & Veatch for their support. Most of all, thank you to everyone who showed up and helped make the afternoon such a memorable one.
