When you include a swear in the title of your new Maine film festival, people are going to come in with a certain set of expectations. Rebellious, maybe. Rough around the edges. Verging on snotty. Definitely not for the kids.
Stephen Bennett, creator of a new short-film festival with an unprintable name, coming to The Apohadion Friday. Photo by Garrick Hoffman
All pretty accurate, as it turns out, concerning the first annual (expletive) in the Dirt film festival, showing one night only – Friday – at Portland’s own home of film screening weirdness, The Apohadion Theater. (The Friday the 13th thing might be a coincidence, but that seems appropriate, too, somehow.) The brainchild of University of Southern Maine Media Studies senior and Cape Elizabeth resident Stephen Bennett, the short-film festival is, indeed, the product of a lot of elements associated with young, aspiring filmmakers. Like frustration, failure, lack of resources and lack of respect from the guardians of the film festival industry. But, talking to Bennett, it quickly becomes evident that there’s more to the naughtily named festival than talking trash.
“In making movies and seeing a lot of students’ movies, it’s often you see there’s so much emphasis on technical skill, and less about taking the time to think, ‘What do you want to tell a story for?’ ” said Bennett, expressing a lesson he’d learned from his own moviemaking experiences. Starting out the way a lot of aspiring filmmakers do, by making movies with friends, Bennett went on to enter that annual acid test for no-budget filmmaking on the fly, The 48 Hour Film Project. Calling his first outing there “reprehensibly terrible” (even before the one screening of the film broke down with technical problems), Bennett persevered, progressing in skill so that, the next year, he was nominated for best emerging filmmaker. Pretty promising, although, as Bennett continued at USM, he found that he was losing some of the raw inspiration amidst the formal studies.
“I found I was making films purely because I wanted to get them into festivals, and not because of the passion behind the ideas,” confessed Bennett. “My work just became sort of self-indulgent.” Seeking a way out of the formalistic doldrums was what led Bennett to strike upon the idea of a short-film festival to showcase other aspiring filmmakers’ work, one where that raw inspiration is the guiding light.
And, thus, (expletive) in the Dirt was born, thanks to the Apohadion’s generosity and eagerness to keep Portland’s film scene strange, and Bennett and his all-volunteer team, who found themselves unexpectedly swamped once they put out a call for worldwide submissions via the indie film festival site FilmFreeway. “We were expecting to get maybe 20 submissions,” Bennett said, still sounding overwhelmed. “We ended up getting over 2,500.” That meant Bennett and his team spent months divvying up the screening tasks in order to whittle down their unexpected bounty of cinematic hopefuls to the 30 shorts that comprise the first ever, 90-minute festival roster.
In addition to the fact that submitting was free, Bennett thinks that the festival’s spirit of DIY enthusiasm is what attracted so many films. He said the judges were drawn from a group “diverse in taste and thought,” and that the overriding principle remained pretty basic. “First, we wanted to showcase films that were good, of course,” said Bennett, “but we were also looking for films where it looks like the people in the films are having a blast. Even if filmmaking doesn’t become your full-time career, you always want it to be fun.” Apart from that, submissions could be any genre and any length, from 9 seconds to 9 minutes.
So what sort of submissions does your festival get when you cast so wide a net? “We got everything from sort of regular shorts telling a story, lots of comedies, some documentaries, some music videos – not too much porn. That was sort of everybody’s concern going in,” Bennett said, laughing. (Indeed, while the inaugural roster would receive an R rating, according to Bennett, it’s solely due to some occasional language.) “We did get a lot of what I’d call typical student film tropes, the sort of ‘shy guy likes a girl but she doesn’t like me’ idea, which really wasn’t what we were looking for.” Asked if any themes seemed to emerge overall, Bennett said that “camp aesthetics” cropped up in more films than anticipated, although he said the best “might delve into something ironically, but then something true comes out of it.”
Fun and truth aren’t bad criteria for selecting films, along with, as Bennett says with pride, “a wide variety in terms of sex and orientation” in the final lineup, which, unsurprisingly according to Bennett, promises something for everyone (including a DJ, warm-up local musicians Frankie Moon and the Dave Matthewses Band, and a Q&A following the screening, complete with free-form short recorded statements from those selectees from away).
With plans to continue both his own career behind the camera and behind the festival, Bennett said that, even in turning so many filmmakers down this time around, the opportunity to have their submissions seen and evaluated on a level playing field was a positive one. “It’s really rewarding to hear back from people – even the responses to rejection emails were thankful. And, at the end of the day, we tell them that, even though we didn’t pick your film, our opinion doesn’t matter. Don’t listen to the gatekeepers of the film industry, keep making movies, and make us sorry one day that we didn’t screen your film.” For a brand-new local film festival bursting with creative energy and enthusiasm and for a fellow young filmmaker like Bennett, it’s vindicating to find some true diamonds down there, too.
The (expletive) in the Dirt film festival screens at the Apohadion Theater on Friday. Doors open at 7:30 p.m., and tickets are $8. Buy them at brownpapertickets.com. You can see some of Bennett’s films on his YouTube channel, Hoojie Morrill.
Dennis Perkins is a freelance writer who lives in Auburn with his wife and cat.
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