Dirty Towel is an incredible short film that premiered at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival. It explores the emotional rollercoaster that comes with traumas, societal expectations, and measuring self-worth.
Directed by Callie Carpinteri, Charlie (Emma Parks) is a teenage girl who has been told from a young age that sex is bad. Her mom (Laura Coover) uses a clean towel to represent what a body is like before sex. A few seconds later, she smothers dirt all over it to represent the body after it experiences sex — “And once it gets dirtier and dirtier, it’ll never be the same as it was.”
The idea for Dirty Towel was birthed in March 2023 from a conversation between Carpinteri and her co-writer, Emma Parks. They discussed the social stigma around women’s sexual experiences, which prompted Parks to share a friend’s story. The friend’s mother used a white towel and dirty handprints to relay shame and disgrace, which Parks and Carpinteri used as inspiration for the film.
At six years old, Charlie’s mom was carrying some heavy trauma. When Charlie was just a child, her mother presented the dirty towel metaphor to her. She was shaking as she spoke and the longer she went the more intense she became. It’s clear that her mother was burned by a man in the past and the only hint we get as to what happened is a flashback scene where Charlie asks her mom to come to her soccer game. She appeared to be wearing a uniform and a name tag, indicating she was heading to work. When she heard Charlie’s comment about both moms and dads coming to games, her mom said, “Your dad doesn’t deserve to see you scoring all those goals. He made his choice a long time ago.” That was followed by, “It’s not your fault, I made a poor decision. But you’re not gonna make the same mistakes that I did.”
Once she finally did have sex for the first time as a teenager, her initial high was destroyed after she saw a towel in the room. This image wrecked her and immediately triggered past interactions with her mom. From then on she goes to war with herself, feeling shame and guilt, and trying to figure out where those feelings came from.
When Charlie goes to the grocery store, she suffers a fate similar to Cersei’s as she walks metaphorically naked, feeling “shame”, and having insults tossed at her instead of food. It was a powerful moment that really drove home how societal expectations can lead to emotional chaos.
Tribeca schedule
Saturday, June 15th at 8:30 PM at AMC 19th St. East 6
Sunday, June 16th at 9:15 PM at AMC 19th St. East 6
Dirty Towel gets an 8.5 out of 10. We get a front-row seat to watch Charlie navigate her conflicting emotions of generational shame and self-worth. The battle that plays out leads her to question whether ‘losing’ her virginity was really a loss. Parks was excellent as Charlie and her onscreen chemistry with Coover flowed nicely as if I was watching a real mother and daughter work through conflicting emotions. I could easily see this being a full-length feature film.
-Jon Jones
Photos: Courtesy of Tribeca Film Festival