CINEFEST: Sudbury acting workshop morphs into surprise film

One of the local movies at this year's international film festival in Sudbury features amateur actors who thought they were just taking a motion picture acting course.

The film Your Name Here weaves together footage from the original 1937 classic film AStar is Born with interviews and scenes re-enacted by actors in a workshop put on by the Sudbury Theatre Centre.

The original idea was to film the actingworkshop topromote futureclasses, saidBenjaminPaquette,the director of the motion picture arts curriculumatThornloeUniversity, and the leader of the acting workshop.

"My thought was we will put together a really interesting six minute kind of advertisement that the Sudbury Theatre Centre can post on itswebpage," he said.

But when Paquette started going through the hours of footage he realized he had something unique on his hands.

"It's a recorded moment in history. It's a little portrait of people in Sudbury," he said.

Paquette decided to mixthere-enacted scenes and interviews withthe workshop actors with scenes from the original movie, which he said is no longer subject to copyright restrictions.

The result was the feature length film Your Name Here which premieres at Cinefest.

Paquette said the actors in the workshop were thrilled to discover they had starred in afeature length film and they plan to be at the Cinefest screening in Sudbury on Monday, Sept. 21.

Paquette told the story of creating the film toMarkus Schwabe on CBC Radio's Morning North: