April 16, 2026
Provided image/Aaron Bartuska
Aaron Bartuska, a film teacher at Notre Dame High School, also directs his own movies. He's pictured above on the set of 'These Are My Friends!'
Aaron Bartuska started making movies when he was 8 years old. The shorts usually featured villains from horror movies he'd watched "probably way too young," he says, like Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees and Chucky. With the help of his cousin, he'd try to reverse engineer what he saw on screen, figuring out how to film a vengeful doll from the most terrifying angles.
Bartuska is 28 now. In the intervening years, he's made a feature-length horror movie and multiple films about young people navigating adult life. His latest — "These Are My Friends!" — plays the Philadelphia Film Society's SpringFest this Friday and Sunday. But directing isn't his full-time job. During the day, the Drexel University grad shows teens how to run a movie set as a teacher at Notre Dame High School in Lawrenceville, New Jersey.
At the Catholic prep school, which is also Bartuska's alma mater, he teaches three courses on film production and studies. The juniors and seniors who take these classes learn about narrative structure, the visual language of movies and the actual nuts and bolts of production, right down to purpose of a clapperboard. Bartuska programs a film festival for his students each year and challenges them to turn around a short film in just 12 hours.
"The kids who really want to go into film, there is a real honesty in the stuff that they make," he said. "... It doesn't matter how good your cameras are or how good your actors are, if you don't have that honesty, your work starts to feel disingenuous."
Bartuska tries to make moviemaking as accessible as possible for his students. Though he shows them "Pulp Fiction" and "High Noon" in class, he also screens low-budget indies like "This Is John," the Duplass brothers short about a man struggling to record his answering machine greeting, and "Pathogen," a zombie movie made by a 12-year-old girl. These are, in Bartuska's estimation, films "they could make tomorrow." He models the message himself as a filmmaker, and his class, in turn, keeps him accountable.
"It does add that little pressure of like, 'Hey, Mr. B, it's been three years since you shot that movie. Are you ever gonna put that out?'" he said. "And I'm like,' Oh, yeah, I do have to put that out.' I can't be a hypocrite because I'm telling them to create things, and then they're seeing me not do it."
Bartuska was already a seasoned filmmaker when he started teaching. Before he even graduated college, he made the 2017 feature "Epilogue" with a grant from Drexel's STAR Scholars Program. Degree in hand, he toured the film festival circuit with his next movie "For Roger," a found-footage horror story. Bartuska was living in Brooklyn and in pre-production for "These Are My Friends!" when he took the job at Notre Dame High School. It brought him back to New Jersey, and in closer proximity to Philadelphia, where he shot his developing project.
"These Are My Friends!" takes place at a raucous house party, where a bunch of twentysomethings have gathered to flirt, smoke and play flip cup. Bartuska filmed most of the movie at his friend's home by 20th and Carpenter streets over the summer of 2022. He'd been to many parties there himself.
"We wanted to kind of capture what one of those felt like," Bartuska said.
For the film's opening and closing, Bartuska ventured outside the South Philly apartment into the wider city. Due to budget constraints, the production had limited location options, but, as Bartuska puts it, "in Philly, everyone seems generally game to help you out." The Kensington coffee shop Buzz Cafe makes a cameo, along with Washington Square, Julian Abele Park and the nighttime city skyline.
Bartuska has already shot two more films in the area, making for an unofficial Philly trilogy. One of them, "Yardley Boys," is already available on YouTube. The other, "Everyone's Here," will debut later this year — hopefully, Barktuska says, at summer film festivals. Though he's based in the Princeton area for his teaching job, the filmmaker is increasingly operating out of Philadelphia. In Bartuska's view, it's home to a "very lively, accepting and unique" movie scene where up-and-coming artists like himself can make films on a "studio level."
"I think there's just a lot of young creatives in the city that want to showcase where they are having their artistic inspiration and where their friends are," Bartuska continued. "And maybe it's half logistically convenient, but also maybe it's half this is a place that isn't in as many films as it should be."
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