The Shit Show Film Show is exacty what it sounds like, says the founder

The Shit Show Film Show is what it sounds like, said the event’s founder, Morgan Savidan. 

"It's definitely a shit show, the no-budget, DIY spirit of it," she said, on her break as a bartender in Inchicore on Thursday evening.

Savidan’s in a camo hat and has acrylic nails bedazzled with rhinestones. She’s wearing rings she made: one had an alien with googly eyes glued on, another had a little duck. 

“I just found a duck in the bar and I glued it on a ring,” she said.

The Shit Show features 20-odd three-ish-minute short films, created a week and a half prior by both experienced and inexperienced filmmakers, selected through a randomised process.   

“There's always shit that goes wrong on the night as well. Sound goes to shit, the screen breaks halfway through. And then I have to entertain them for five minutes,” said Savidan.

The next show – the fifth – is set for 2 February at Fidelity. Savidan has run them twice a year since 2024, and each time she changes things a bit: the rules, themes, the awards.

She likes the idea of a no-pressure opportunity for people to try their hands at filmmaking, for them to have fun with it, and for her to have fun with it too. 

There’s rules that keep the films unpolished: they can’t spend any money on it, though maybe people take the bus or something. They have 10 days to make it. No AI.

"If you are found to have used AI, your film will not be showcased ... and we will publicly shame the shit out of you on the night of the event,” she said.

Even if applicants wanted to, they wouldn’t be able to plan too much because there’s themes each time, and she only announces those when the clock starts ticking.

For one show, Savidan asked everyone to send a photo of their favourite Spar product, and then jumbled them up and gave them out to people as the theme they should work to, she said

“Someone got leek soup, and they made a really cool existential film about being leek soup," she said.

The filmmakers

Iarla McKeon has won three out of four of the Shit Shows so far. 

Sitting in the outdoor area of the Portobello Bar on Monday evening, he said he has the advantage of having good equipment, a good team, and experience as a filmmaker. 

He keeps entering because he likes the challenge, and the goofiness of the Shit Show. "You're like, Okay, everyone else is doing it. Fuck it. We're all in this together,” he said.

For the upcoming fifth Shit Show, Savidan has banned McKeon from winning  – which is a win in itself, he acknowledged reluctantly. 

He said the Shit Show is special because it’s not about winning, it’s about roping in your mum, filming in local spots, trying out ideas from the notebook. He also values seeing the audience's reaction, getting to see what lands and what doesn’t.

“It’s just who had the most fun doing it. That's really who wins,” McKeon said. 

“Sometimes it is very difficult. You know, doing a shit show in the middle of winter. Filming outside,” he said. “You know, you can make it as easy or as hard as you want. But it's always fun, you know?”

Saorla Rodger said she knew about the film fest because she studied acting with Savidan, and she made a film for the first Shit Show Film Show. 

Since then, she’s submitted films to the show once more, she says. 

“The first one was about a girl who got sucked up into a street sweeper. Like one of those electric street sweepers. And about her kind of life within that – the  sweeper,” Rodger said.

Rodger said the point is to not take it too seriously.

“If someone is too good or too, I don't know, professional about it … It's not that, like people won't like it. But I feel like, I don't know, there's just a sort of, like – people like the stuff that's very scrappy,” she said.

Rodger said she’s always been into writing, and she is working on trying to write short scripts, “and trying to, like, do a more official, you know, film in some way.” That ambition is still simmering. 

She said the industry is hard to get into, “or, you've got to know the right people or whatever, so it's maybe intimidating to create something or write something and be like, this could be an actual film or whatever”. 

With Shit Show, it’s less intimidating, some of the pressure is off – and there’s a deadline to help push her into producing something, Rodger said. “I think that's the beauty of it.”

Sodiq Ajibola Abiola said that like many other participants, his bread and butter is acting, but he said he likes filmmaking and he liked that this gave the opportunity without pressure.

"It was a great opportunity to just make something kind of fun, kind of dumb, and it's in the name – Shit Show – so like, yeah, I'll make something kind of shitty, and hopefully everyone enjoys it," he said.

Abiola co-created a film a comedic short film for the Shit Show with Andy Hourihan, about a tiff between housemates. 

Since then, Abiola has gone on to create his first professional short film this year.

“I recently got funded for a short film, andI feel like I might not have fully applied for that funding if I didn't go through Shit Show,” he said. 

It “gave me the confidence of, like, okay, I can make something and put it in front of people”, he said. 

That film is going to be in the Dublin International Film Festival. "So, yes, I'm both an actor and filmmaker now,” Abiola said.

The films

McKeon said the films he’s worked on for the show have progressively become more advanced. 

The first was about a game of Jeopardy: a film about a man drinking and watching an old tape of himself on Jeopardy. He gets the last question wrong, his life devolves. 

“It ends with him making a Molotov cocktail and burning his house down. And then it comes up with the words, like, it's this whole, it's his whole awareness thing, like awareness campaign PSA, where it's like, ‘Don't play the game, if you can't do the shame,’ sort of thing,’” he said. 

His latest was the most ambitious, said McKeon, because they had to create an understanding of an alternative reality. 

It was set in a version of 1946 in which the US didn’t have any nukes. This one also had a whole plot line, but in the end, it turns out to be an ad for cigarettes.

Rodger and her partner Robbie Doyle, meanwhile, made a film that was built around a song they hoped they could win the show’s Best Song award with.

It’s a follow-up to Rupert Holmes’s classic about liking piña coladas and being caught in the rain: “They Escape (The Piña Colada Song)”.

Their song, called “Sex on the Bed” is about the couple from the song some years later, “living in monogamy and having a nice married life together.” 

 On it, Doyle plays a banjo-lele, a cross between a banjo and a ukulele. 

At the show they won Best Song. “Which, yeah, that was, that was really, yeah, we were happy with that,” Rodger said.

The Shit Show

Once the 10 days are up and the filmmakers have all made their films, Savidan arranges a screening of them all on an evening at a venue in Dublin. 

It’s been at the Pearse Centre, at Hen’s Teeth, at Fidelity, as it will be for the upcoming show.

The night is silly, says Savidan, the creator. "We're all watching films, we're all having fun, we're eating candy.”

“I'm throwing candy at you guys, and then we're all getting little shitty awards and going yay or going boo,” she says.

There’s random rules: for example  Savidan introduced the “Kanye card,” which she would hide under a seat.

“At the end of the showing, before people go off to vote, I would like tell them to look under their chairs,” Savidan said.

Whoever found it under theirs could stand up and contest the winner when it was announced, a reference to when Kanye took the mic to dispute Taylor Swift’s win of Best Female Video at the 2009 MTV Video Music Video Awards. 

There’s also the Michael D. Higgins Pokemon card, made by Savidan, and whoever was nicest to the bartender was surprised by it at the end.

There are awards, too. Although Savidan said the prizes are pretty much just a bag of lost and found from her house, made up of things found the morning after a party.

“So it'll be like a foam finger, a little like cup noodle from my fridge. Well, not my fridge. It'll be like coffee. It'll be like a water gun,” she said.

Funded by the Local Democracy Reporting Scheme.