Film Screening: Unless Something Goes Terribly Wrong

Join us for a screening and discussion of Unless Something Goes Terribly Wrong, Winner of the Audience Award at the 2025 Camden Film Festival. Nick Rico, superintendent of Wells Sanitary District, will join us to be part of a discussion following the screening.

Wastewater plants across the country are in need of resuscitation. Half a century after the Clean Water Act radically improved how we handle our sewage, our once modern facilities have aged beyond their intended lifespans. Pipes are cracking, and growing populations push plants to their limits. The threats are mounting, but the infrastructure hasn’t changed. And, just when it seems things couldn’t get any worse, a cancer-causing contaminant (PFAS) enters the scene and threatens to collapse the entire house of cards.

In response, one plant that can’t afford to ever shut down, must find clever solutions to an ever-growing mountain of problems. Over the course of one calendar year, this film follows the day-to-day operations of one wastewater facility and the funny, close-knit, and inventive individuals working to keep it all running. Unless Something Goes Terribly Wrong is a buddy comedy about poop and the thankless pursuit of making a better world.

Watch the Trailer

Directors' Statement

Kaitlyn Schwalje: I am the daughter of a safety engineer. When catastrophe strikes, my father enters the scene. When a factory worker’s hand is ground into a chicken processing machine, he figures out why it happened and who was at fault. My father raised me with an early education in disaster....We were disaster anthropologists. This exercise of breaking down an event into its respective parts became a lens through which to better understand the world. I became fascinated by the mechanisms that govern how everything works and fails. Making documentary films is my way to ground these stories within a character-driven, human-centric context. With every project, I hope to better connect process and emotion in a way that sheds new perspective on the hidden pockets of our complex world.

Alex Wolf Lewis: I am a middle child who grew up on a healthy diet of SNL (during the golden years of Adam Sandler and Chris Rock), making people laugh was a defense mechanism and a way to keep the peace in a big family. As a filmmaker, I see comedy as a tool to tell important stories and draw audiences into worlds they might otherwise overlook. Kaitlyn and I fell in love with everyone we met in the wastewater industry. Throughout the industry is a strong sense of dedication mixed with a dark sense of humor. My aim was to get audiences to see that and hopefully, make them fall in love with the characters as well.

Success as directors is telling stories that combine these elements of the spectacle within a framework that uncovers the hidden structures that govern how our world works. Success also means imbuing these stories with the magic and sparkle that drew us to the story in the first place, with a good dose of humor thrown in.