Ann Arbor City Council member Sabra Briere sits in a room filled with desks. Along with other volunteers, she’s making phone calls to get out the vote for presidential candidate Senator Weston.

Senator Who? Weston is a character in the new movie musical Liberty’s Secret, which will get the red-carpet treatment at the Michigan Theater for one night on Sept. 22 before going on to festivals in the U.S. and abroad. And Briere is one of about 150 extras from the Ann Arbor area who appear in it.

Andy Kirshner, who teaches at the U-M’s art and music schools, wrote and directed the political satire about two women who fall in love on the campaign trail of a family values candidate. After eight years of planning and fundraising, the 2014 shoot went smoothly, though assembling extras was sometimes a problem. Kirshner needed sixty people to attend a wedding, for instance; the day before the shoot, he had fifteen. “You need people in a restaurant or at a wedding, or it doesn’t look real,” he says. Friends began to make calls and recruit on social media, and seventy extras showed up at Trinity Evangelical Lutheran Church. Trinity pastor Lori Carey played a pastor in the scene.

One of the leads is Chelsea-raised U-M grad Cara AnnMarie; featured Ann Arborites include actor-director-theater prof Malcolm Tulip, former Performance Network artistic director David Wolber, and U-M voice prof Caroline Helton.

The U-M campus safety building on Kipke Dr. served as the campaign headquarters where Briere volunteered. A big gospel number was filmed at the Vineyard Church. Other locations included the Millennium Club downtown and the Michigan League ballroom, as well as the Field of Dreams Wedding Chapel in Milan and the former Wolverine Grill in Ypsilanti.

Months after he thought he’d finished, Kirshner decided the film needed a falling-in-love montage; he took his camera and characters out to make one.

“We tried not to make the locations too obvious, but people who know the area will recognize them,” he says. Can you spot the Jiffy Mix Factory in Chelsea or Dexter’s A&W drive-in?