Emotional Premiere of "After the Fire"

Around 150 people filled the Cedar Lane Cinema in Teaneck on Wednesday night to watch the premiere of “After the Fire,” a documentary about the fire in a Seton Hall dorm that killed three students. 

The three victims of that blaze, Aaron Karol, John Giunta and Frank Caltabilota, were there in memory.

“It was a good movie,” said Gina Caltabilota, Frank’s sister. “But I lived through all of it, so it brought up a lot of emotions.”

Like Caltabilota, who said she was the only one in her family who was ready to watch the film in public, many of the people in the audience had a direct connection to the people in the film.

Shawn Simons, whose recovery from devastating burns was a focal point of the film, saw the film for the first time Wednesday night.

“I am just in awe right now,” he said afterward. “It sparked a lot of memories, but I feel like there are a lot of people who need to hear this story.”

Today Simons lectures high school and college students about the importance of fire safety.

Another key person in the film, Alvaro Llanos, who made an even more treacherous recovery from terrible burns, did not attend the premiere. His childhood friend Jerry Crespo, who said he had spent the afternoon with Llanos, said his friend wasn’t ready yet.

“He didn’t feel comfortable,” Crespo said. “He didn’t want to relive those memories again.”

The film focused on the deep friendship that grew between Simons and Llanos in the burn unit at Saint Barnabas Hospital as both young men fought arduously to heal.

The film, directed by Guido Verweyn, also chronicled the intense detective work that eventually led law enforcement to win a confession from the arsonists, Sean Ryan and Joseph LePore, depicted in the film as smirking frat boys.

Verweyn, on assignment for National Geographic, could not be at the premiere.

After the credits rolled, a member of the audience asked how much jail time Ryan and LePore served. Before John Frucci, a detective with Essex County who was featured in the film, could tell the audience that the two arsonists served less than three years each, another audience member called out, “not enough!”

“I personally try not to think about them any more,” Frucci said.

The film featured wrenching details about Simons and Llanos’ injuries including Simons’ mother describing her son’s hair falling out in her hands and a photograph of Llanos looking at himself in a mirror for the first time after the fire. The photos were snapped by Matt Rainey, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2001 for his work on the Seton Hall fire story.

“A great many of the pictures in this film were never published until now,” he said. “I’m seeing them for the first time in 11 years.”

Chris Ruhren, who nursing director of the burn unit at Saint Barnabus Hospital, said she wept though the whole film.

“When you’re working on a burn unit you have to put aside your emotions,” she said. “Sometimes you don’t realize what you do until you see it on the screen.”

Also at the premiere was Robin Gaby Fisher, who covered Simons and Llanos’ recovery for the Newark Star Ledger and went on to write a bestselling book called “After the Fire; a True Story of Friendship and Survival,” on which the film was based.

“This started as a story of burns,” she said. “And it ended up being a story of hope and inspiration.”