River City Stories w/filmmakers Paul Hood & Wallace McKelvey

Name: River City Stories w/filmmakers Paul Hood & Wallace McKelvey
Start: 2025-05-16T19:30:00-04:00
End: 2025-05-18T14:00:00-04:00
Location: Zoetropolis Cinema Stillhouse

Schedule

Fri, 16 May, 2025 at 07:30 pm to Sun, 18 May, 2025 at 02:00 pm

UTC-04:00

Location

Zoetropolis Cinema Stillhouse | Lancaster, PA

River City Stories is a love letter to the city of Harrisburg, a series of overlapping tales of people whose paths cross in the capital city by the Susquehanna. Inspired by the people and places Paul Hood and Wallace McKelvey hold dear, the show is a collection of lives, feelings, and perspectives. By turns funny and devastating, the filmmakers sought to document the lives of people divided by arbitrary lines on a map but connected by simple truths that transcend the boundaries of class, race, gender, and geography.

Paul Hood and Wallace McKelvey first met nearly a decade ago. After years of circling each other — promising to collaborate one day — they were brought together again by circumstance: the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. River City Stories was rooted in the conversations they shared, socially distanced, over many nights around Wallace’s backyard firepit in Midtown and on the front porch of Paul’s apartment on Allison Hill’s State Street.

Paul and Wallace are different people with unique perspectives on the world. One is straight, one is gay. One black, the other white. One a Harrisburg native, the other a transplant. But what emerged from these long conversations about life in Harrisburg was a shared love of the place they call home. Paul and Wallace wrote a series of interlocking stories, informed by their own experiences in the city, examining various aspects of life here — the grief and the joy we all share.