Imagine if five teenage girls stole UNCW lecturer Ed Wagenseller’s credit card for a night of carefree fun without consequences. Sounds a little bit crazy, but that’s the basic plotline of “to.get.her,” a film directed by Erica Dunton that will be featured at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, Jan. 20 through Jan. 30.

Wagenseller has been acting since high school and currently teaches various theater classes at UNCW. He says that teaching at a university still allows him to pursue his acting career, leading to numerous features in regional and national commercials and walk-on parts in films such as “Home of the Giants” and “Talladega Nights.”

Wagenseller worked with Dunton on one of her previous films, “The One.” In “to.get.her,” he plays the soon-to-be stepfather of one of the girls. The film is a thriller that chronicles the seemingly consequence free weekend of five best friends as histories are unraveled and secrets are revealed.

“I got a phone call out of the blue,” said Wagenseller. “[Dunton] asked me to read a script and asked if I was interested in the part. It’s a great script.”

“to.get.her” is featured in the Sundance Film Festival NEXT category, which includes “American films selected for their innovative and original work in low- and no-budget filmmaking,” according to the festival’s website.

“When we were making [the film] it just had this ensemble feeling to it. It felt like a theater production,” Wagenseller said. “The cast was very close, and we were all pitching in.”

The film will premiere at 9 p.m. this Friday, Jan. 21. Wagenseller said the film got a good time slot, but it will have a lot of competition.

All screenings for the film are sold out—even Wagenseller and other members of the cast don’t have a ticket to see their own film at Sundance. But Wagenseller still plans on going to the festival, seeing other films and hearing the buzz about “to.get.her.”

“It’s a potentially once in a lifetime experience,” he said. “I’m going to take in as many films as I can, network with as many people as I can and see what happens.”

He pointed out that while Sundance is a festival about filmmaking and art, it is also very much about the business side of things. Ideally, the film will sell to a distributor that plans for widespread marketing and screening.

Wagenseller anticipates that Dunton will enter “to.get.her” in Cucalorus, the annual independent film festival based in Wilmington. If the film doesn’t sell at Sundance, Wagenseller said he’s hoping there will be private screenings.

According to Wagenseller, he hopes that his role in the film will lead to similar roles in the future, even though the production was small.

“I hope to land more meaty roles like this one. I’m in the beginning, the end and the middle of the film,” Wagenseller said. “There’s something about getting to work on a character for more than one or two lines—more in-depth.”