Winning isn’t everything. For Brewer native Todd Verow, simply getting his drama “Little Shots of Happiness” into the prestigious Berlin Film Festival was enough.

But prizes mean money, and cash is what Verow and his equally poor producers need after financing “Little Shots” out of their own pockets.

Let’s put this in perspective. The film cost less than $20,000 to produce, lower than low budget by Hollywood standards. That’s less than the salary of your average key grip on “Independence Day.” But it’s a lot of money when your regular job is selling tickets at the local movie theater.

The advance reviews look good. Ulrich Gregor, who heads the Berlinale’s International Forum of Young Cinema, singled out “Little Shots” for praise in a recent Variety magazine article, calling the film “a real gift.” It is one of two American dramas competing in the Forum this year, the other being “Illtown” by Nick Gomez, whose 1993 “Laws of Gravity” was a critical success.

“It’s a great place for me to have my premier,” Verow said Monday in a telephone interview from his Boston-based production company, Bangor Films.

“They judge the work for the work. Festivals here like the Sundance Film Festival tend to look at who’s in it and who produced it. So if you’re in a certain clique, you’re more likely to get a favorable judgment.”

Judging occurs on Monday. Reaction to the film, which premiered Wednesday night in a 2,000-seat theater in Berlin’s Zoo district, may determine if it gets a wide independent release or sinks into cinematic obscurity.

Not that Verow finds the fringes an uncomfortable place. It’s his home. And the home of most of his characters.

“You don’t hear much about these people,” said the 30-year-old Verow. “And what you do hear is distorted. I’m attracted to people who don’t want the house in the suburbs and the 2.5 kids, who don’t have a 9 to 5 job, and are trying to etch out a life beyond the boundaries of society. … I’m like that myself.”

“Little Shots of Happiness” tells the story of Frances (played by Bonnie Dickenson), a young woman who tries to escape her 9 to 5 existence at a credit collection agency in a series of bizarre encounters in Boston bars.

The title has a double meaning. Happiness is fleeting, and the search for it often leads to the shot glass.

“A problem with people is that they don’t know what they want, and so often they don’t find it,” Verow said. And like many cinematic gestures, the theme comes from Verow’s own life.

Shortly before his graduation from John Bapst Memorial High School, Verow struggled with a choice: whether to go with the practical career path he’d chosen, biomedical engineering, or to do something more right-brained.

“He’s always been creative,” said his dad, Archie Verow, Brewer’s longtime city clerk. “When he was a kid, he asked me `Dad, do they have a school for inventors?”‘ Their Brewer household was always filled with new inventions, from games to a motorized skateboard.

Verow decided to go with his passion for film, “even if it meant I was going to have to live on the street.”

While he’s never been homeless, Verow has had his share of odd jobs to fill his director’s voyeuristic eye: video clerk in Los Angeles, ticketseller at a San Francisco porn theater, and security guard in the Islamic art section of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

The Berlin festival, Verow’s second, is a chance to live in style, if only for a while. The festival paid for the airfare and hotel rooms for Verow, the production crew, and Dickenson, the film’s lead actress.

At last year’s festival, Verow was invited to parties attended by show business powerhouses like Bruce Willis, Michael Stipe and Dustin Hoffman.

The recent Variety article noted that his latest offering was “more accessible” than “Frisk,” which he showed in Berlin last year.

The New York Times gave high praise to the acting in “Frisk,” Verow’s metaphorical treatment of AIDS, but called its graphic depictions of homosexual sex and dismemberment “harshly repellent.” The Los Angeles Times, however, called it a “serious and discreet work of considerable dark impact.”

“Variety reviewed it the same week they did `Sgt. Bilko,”‘ said Archie Verow. “They gave `Frisk’ two thumbs down, one thumb up, and one thumb sideways. They gave `Sgt. Bilko’ four thumbs down. He called me and said, `Dad, at least I did better than `Sgt. Bilko.”‘

While “Frisk” drew from Dennis Cooper’s novel of the same name, “Little Shots of Happiness” drew on more mundane sources, such as reality based TV shows like “COPS” and “Real Stories of the Highway Patrol.”

The film was designed to look like a documentary. Its script, with the exception of a narrative voice-over, was almost entirely improvised.

For Dickenson, who worked for free, “Little Shots of Happiness” was a method-acting walk on the wild side.

“I started living out her fantasies in real life,” she said in an interview before leaving for Berlin. “I’m not a method actor. I tend to live a healthy lifestyle. … But all in the sudden, I started smoking. I started drinking. I started getting into this darker aspect of myself that I didn’t even know was there.”

Throughout the monthlong filming, Verow was understanding but exhausting in his demands as a director.

“He’s very understated,” said Dickenson. “If you’ve done an unbelievably fabulous job, he’d just say:`OK, that’s good.”‘

Sometime in the near future, Verow hopes to return to Bangor to film a script in the works called “Final Girl,” a “rethinking” of the slasher film. Verow also pays homage to his hometown on his business card, which portrays the sprawled, gunned-down body of gangster Al Brady.

And in Brewer, Verow’s parents are looking forward to seeing their son’s latest offering, having been denied a peek at “Frisk.”

“He told his mother, `You can see this one,”‘ said Archie Verow.