Stephen Bennett, Maverick Keegan and Amanda Brill, organizers of the (Expletive) in the Dirt film festival. Photo by Chase Wheelock
When you name your film festival something that the local papers can’t print, you’re making a statement. Such is the ethos behind the Portland-based (Expletive) in the Dirt Film Festival, a one-night celebration of no-budget filmmaking founded by filmmaker and former University of Southern Maine film student Stephen Bennett. As the film festival’s website proudly proclaims, “Frankly, we’re sick of film snobs. So we started a film festival that celebrates the imperfections of no-to-low budget filmmaking.”
Thus: (Expletive) in the Dirt.
Bennett, who carries on the decidedly no-budget festival through its sixth year of grubby greatness, freely admits that the festival’s creation was largely a spiteful “(expletive) you” toward the film festivals that steadfastly refused to screen his own low-budget, Maine-made films. Art is born of many forces, and spite is as legitimate as any, with Bennett, alongside fellow USM grads and trusted festival partners Maverick Keenan and Amanda Brill, having kept the (Expletive) in the Dirt spirit burning since 2019, with Portland’s Apohadion Theater providing this collection of homemade also-rans a suitable home on Friday. “The Apohadion was the only place that would take us at first,” chuckled Bennett, “but it’s a place that fits our needs really well.”
And those needs are strangely tough to define. As any fan (like me) of so-called “bad movies” can tell you, there’s bad, and then there’s bad. Let Bennett try to explain. “The festival has evolved over the years to where we’re featuring low-budget films that are actually good and films that are so bad or so far into campy, shocking quality that you just have to keep watching. Labeling is almost disrespectful in some way – it’s about getting as much joy out of these films as possible.”
Indeed, without applying one label or another, Bennett excitedly talks about a couple of this year’s 18 short entries, such as one called “Valentoes Dinner,” in which a woman’s right and left feet share a romantic meal together. He’s also high on the aptly titled, “Toilet Paper Ninja IV: Flush of the Forgotten,” a spoof of Japanese samurai films, made by a father and his two 8-year-old sons, complete with wildly inaccurate dubbing work. Said Bennett of the filmmakers from around the world (this year’s fest features works from the U.S., Canada, France, Bulgaria, Italy and Spain) drawn to a film showcase called what he and his cohorts steadfastly call it, “We’ve built an identity and some filmmakers understand what the vibe is, what the scope of the fest is.”
That vibe remains elusive to many, the festival’s name alone enough to send some otherwise game indie film fans scurrying on past the Apohadion. According to Bennett, they’re making a mistake. “People ask us why we don’t change the name, but the name has so much value. Those who tip their noses up at (Expletive) in the Dirt are missing out. Some of these films are campy, funny and really effective.” Indeed, talking to the founder of (Expletive) in the Dirt is to understand just how much thought, hard work, and genuine love and respect for films and filmmakers go into the creation, maintenance and curation of an event seemingly dedicated to bad movies.
“We’re definitely a festival of the underdogs,” said Bennett. “We all come from the USM media studies background and that helps inform our understanding of where a lot of filmmakers are coming from. It’s great when you see films made by people with no formal film education, just as it’s exciting to see a film clearly made by a film student who’s choosing not to adhere to what’s being taught. We’re subversive but accessible.”
And Bennett, Keenan and Brill certainly get lots of practice refining the festival’s mission, plowing through thousands of submissions of, let’s call it, wildly varying quality. “We used to not charge to submit,” says Bennett, “which would net us 2-3,000 submissions per year. Now we charge a $5 last-minute fee after the free submission period, and that still means we’re watching some 500 movies, which is a lot easier for us. Still, sometimes it’s daunting – I get a pit in my stomach sometimes, thinking, ‘This isn’t going to connect to anyone.’ But then you start to see stuff that’s interesting. They’re low-budget, but there’s some level of storytelling quality.” The three-person screening committee is then widened to a two- to three-hour viewing session for a selected group of friends who, pizza and beer provided, take on the monumental task of separating the entertainingly bad from the, well, (expletive).
If that sounds like a lot of effort going into choosing a roster of short films destined to shock, offend, baffle or otherwise turn off a paying audience of Maine film fans, it is. As Bennett, a musician and clinical counselor in training as well as a still-aspiring filmmaker puts it, “Sometimes people who come to the festival see us and say, ‘Wow, you guys are too nice. You smell too decent – how are you the people running this?’ We’re just us. With art scenes, there always has to be some sort of gatekeeping, you have to be X-degree weird or look a certain way. We like to think that (Expletive) in the Dirt is accessible to folks from all walks of life, all backgrounds and ages.”
It’s a fascinating endeavor, one that seeks to give filmmakers starting with literally nothing a place to show their raw, unfiltered work while simultaneously thumbing its nose at film industry and festival convention. Said Bennett, “It’s almost like a a Trojan horse. We get people coming in thinking it’s going to be one thing and coming away thinking, ‘You know, some of those movies were actually really good.’ We have walkouts, but we’ve had people in their 60s come up to us and say they loved it.”
This year’s (Expletive) in the Dirt Film Festival will be showing at Portland’s Apohadion Theater on Friday at 8 p.m. Doors open at 7 for a performance from Portland band Plague Dad. Tickets are $10 and the program runs 80 minutes.
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