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.