Student Film 'Rerun' Premieres at BMFI

At the August premiere of body-switch comedy "The Change-Up," Sandra Bullock—who'd captured the imagination of the nation and its tabloids the previous winter when she adopted a child, won an Oscar and discovered her husband cheating on her with a Nazi-sympathetic tattoo model in quick succession—started a fresh round of intensive speculation on her romantic life when she showed up on the red carpet with star Ryan Reynolds.

Monday night at the premier of "Rerun," the cast just came with their parents.

The student production was the fruit of the Institute's Summer Filmmaking Workshop, a sort of bootcamp for aspiring auteurs. In its fourth season, 10 high school students wrote, shot, and edited a featurette over a six-week period in July and August, ultimately producing what at least three people called the program's most ambitious film yet.

"That was the first time I'd seen it—the full, polished product," said Danny Garfield, the press-shy protagonist of the surprisingly mind-bending short—think "Groundhog Day" crossed with Richard Linklater's "Waking Life" and then rewritten by really smart, morbid teenagers—from the corner of a room off the theatre's lobby after the screening.

Garfield, tall and lanky, with a helmet of curly black hair, made his acting debut playing Louis, a waiter who, through an unclear mechanism, continuously relives a brief stretch of the same afternoon with increasingly disastrous consequences. The Lower Merion High School senior said he played a different role in the production than he originally envisioned.

"I've always been interested in filmmaking, but I wanted to be someone behind the camera," he said as crew and audience buzzed in front of him. "Somehow here, in this, though, I ended up acting."

His mother, a local journalist, corrected the record. "Danny doesn't actually have 'no acting experience,'" she said, making sure her son was out of earshot. "He played 'Winthrope in Penn Wynne Elementary['s The Music Man]. He brought the house down. He did the lisp and everything."

Abbi Linden-Chirlian, a senior at Radnor High School, was similarly inexperienced when she came to camp, but landed the role of Addy, the slippery object of Garfield's affection.

"I'm a core dancer in the musicals at school, but I'd never actually acted," said Linden-Chirlian before a compliment got her attention.

Molly Clark, a high school freshman, didn't get much screen time in "Rerun" but was one of its producers. Slight and loquacious, Clark was charged with getting permission to shoot on the locations the team targeted.

"I missed some time though because I was away," she admitted.

Her mom, Stacy, said Molly caught the movie bug when they visited Los Angeles last summer to see a taping of The Ellen DeGeneres Show and she bumped into actress Tina Fey.

"I was in the lobby of our hotel, and I opened a door, and Tina Fey was all alone in there signing copies of her book. So I shut the door, went to the gift shop to get an InStyle Magazine—which she was on the cover of—and sent Molly in. She got 15 minutes alone with her," she explained.

Chris Fusco mingled easily with children, parents, and the hard-to-place types who show up for free things. The owner of production company Network Philly, Fusco has directed the workshop for its last three seasons.

"I kept warning [the crew] how ambitious this idea was, and they didn't care," he said, likely in reference to the challenge of pulling off, on only a $1,000 budget, two separate scenes of someone getting hit by car.

This team, he said, was unique.

"The benchmark of a successful program is how well a group comes together, and I don't know that I've ever seen a group come together as well as this one," he added.