Filmmakers and friends—including Meehan (center-left, in suit)—at the Museum of Fine Arts. Photograph: J.D. Levine

On the afternoon of Saturday, December 11, an eclectic crowd, from snowy haired grandparents to spirited preschoolers, began massing in the foyer outside the Boston Museum of Fine Arts’ Remis Auditorium. In its midst, dozens of young adults, sharply dressed in blazers, suits (ties optional), skirts, and stylish scarves, chatted excitedly and snapped photos of one another with cellphones and cameras. Only a smattering of Boston College caps and sweatshirts dotted the landscape, but it was a Boston College crowd. They had come for the premiere screening of a collection of films titled “BC, I Love You.”

Modeled after Paris Je T’Aime (Paris, I Love You), and New York, I Love You—both feature-length films consisting of romance-themed shorts by multiple directors, set in their eponymous locales—”BC, I Love You” was the brainchild of film studies major Sean Meehan ’11. As a sophomore, Meehan envisioned a medley of short movies that could only take place at Boston College and that would, one way or another, have love as their theme. “I was just getting to know the people in the department,” he recalls, “and a project like this seemed a great way for us to work together in a big collective.”

The concept began to take shape in the fall of 2010, when Meehan and 10 other filmmakers (eight seniors, a junior, and Gautam Chopra, a lecturer in film studies) began holding weekly planning meetings. Meehan’s requirement was that anyone proposing to direct a film also had to help in some capacity—as, say, cinematographer, assistant director, or sound recorder—on at least two other projects. (Two of the participants ultimately opted to pitch in on others’ films rather than create their own.) The directors tapped the theater department for acting talent, casting 52 undergraduates, and conducted their shoots around campus, at locations such as O’Neill Plaza, Alumni Stadium, and the Mods, from late October through Thanksgiving.

Booking the Museum of Fine Arts for the screening, without charge, was the work of Carter Long, an adjunct professor in the University’s 12-year-old film studies program who is curator of film at the Museum of Fine Arts. Long was Meehan’s instructor in a class on Hollywood directors, and he overheard Meehan and his collaborators talking about the project. “Their enthusiasm was amazing,” he says. So he offered them the auditorium, ordinarily a venue for art flicks and foreign film festivals.

Some 380 relatives and friends of the filmmakers, including most of the approximately 100 students who had been involved in the project, filled Remis to capacity. As the filmmakers made their way from the back of the auditorium to reserved seats at the front, whoops and cheers erupted, and the audience rose to give them a standing ovation.

The nine films ranged in length from 150 seconds to 11 minutes, taking as their subject matter all manner of campus crushes. The Burglars, for example, features a pair of good friends who return to campus for their 10th reunion and discover—after breaking into one of their old dorms on a whim—that they have feelings for each other. In Meehan’s Game Face, Baldwin the Eagle turns out to be a shy young woman who is only able to work up the courage to tell a certain classmate she likes him by putting on her eagle costume. A dialogue-free film, Sole Mates, shot entirely from the ankles down, shows a pair of feet in fuzzy, outsize slippers managing to lure more than one shapely pair of feet in high heels to his dorm room. Another, Apocalypse, about an off-campus student secretly in love with his female flatmate, features absurdist outbursts of a cappella singing.

The film that elicited perhaps the most enthusiastic reaction was Mary Ann’s Love Story (running time: six minutes), which depicts an over-the-top night at the notoriously divey Cleveland Circle bar that has been a favorite student hangout for decades. The film’s lead character, an incongruous pompous patron, is played by Sutton Dewey ’11, who in real life bartends at Mary Ann’s.

When the lights went up just over an hour later, the filmmakers were treated to a second standing ovation. They then fielded questions ranging from how the project had come about to what kind of support they’d received from the film studies program (the department footed the bill for buses from campus to the MFA screening, but the directors were otherwise self-funded), and had director Mark Millner ’11 needed health department approval to film in the Mary Ann’s men’s bathroom? (Answer: No.) Afterwards, everyone filed back into the foyer, where the conviviality showed no sign of letting up, until museum guards materialized to explain that the building was closing, and the party would have to continue elsewhere.

It did, at—where else?­—Mary Ann’s.

The organizers began planning for a Valentine’s Day reprise of the screening to take place on campus. Meehan hopes to make “BC, I Love You” available for purchase on DVD.

Sage Stossel is a Boston-based writer.

Read more by Sage Stossel