River Valley Film Festival Celebrates Its Baseball Roots with ‘Rap Dixon: Beyond Baseball,’ Screens Crowd-Pleasing Breakout ‘American Comic’

Megan McLachlan is in Williamsport, Pa., for the inaugural River Valley Film Festival, taking place July 18 through 20.

The first-ever River Valley Film Festival in Williamsport, Pa., kicked off with the perfect film to screen in the home of the Little League World Series: Scott Orris’s thorough and thoughtful documentary Rap Dixon: Beyond Baseball.

Rap Dixon was a Negro League baseball player who had 14 straight hits, was the first Black player to hit a homerun at Yankee Stadium, and was awarded a trophy from the Emperor of Japan for his stretch overseas. Sadly, Dixon died at age 41 right before the leagues integrated and his impact could be celebrated.

“I knew I needed to tell the story and had to raise awareness about this,” said Orris in the Q&A following the screening. “And the fact that he died in 1944 and wasn’t around to talk about himself in the ’70s when the Negro players were going into the Hall of Fame, I just felt there was a massive hole here. It’s our job as historians to not just tell the stories that are right in front of us but the stories that are hard.”

There were A LOT of baseball fans in the audience, and it was fun watching the banter back and forth between the filmgoers and the filmmaker.

Saturday Shorts and More Narrative Films

On Saturday, the shorts block ran the gamut of AI-generated films to silent horror pieces, like the memorably terrifying Better Like This, where a man sees a shadowy force when he takes off his glasses.

“It’s an ocular film that really relies on its visual thematic and gimmick,” said director Brian Hauser in the Q&A, “and I really didn’t want to distract with dialogue. It was always conceived as a silent film.”

Max Wilhelm, who directed the Bonnie & Clyde meets Thelma & Louise short Kill for Love, talked about doing a “road trip movie on a budget.”

“Our lead was actually the lead in the school play at the time,” said Wilhelm. “So literally we’d have her for an hour and a half, and then she’d go act in a school play. It really came down to figuring out where we could shoot and where we were allowed to shoot. We had to figure out what we could do with two actors, an hour, and limited experience. At the hotel [where we shot], they thought it was a TikTok, but we came in with our $15,000 camera from Lycoming College.”

How I Spent My Summer Vacation, What Really Happened, & American Comic

“I have to say this in front of everyone here: I was never a little girl,” joked writer-director Kenneth R. Frank about his fresh take on a coming-of-age film, How I Spent My Summer Vacation in the Q&A following the screening. In the film, death-obsessed Grace (Raquel Sciacca) tackles her fear of the water while grappling with her grandfather’s illness, something that mirrored Frank’s own experience growing up.

“It does start with the summer I became aware my grandfather was dying,” said Frank. “As I was writing it, I started to identify from the father’s perspective because my children are that age. I think of that summer as my entry into the world of adults where I realized, oh these people don’t know what they’re doing. In the best way, not in a critical way. They don’t have it figured out, and I tried to capture that while also watching your children going through that. I started in one place and ended in another.”

Writer-director Simon Stockdale’s voyeuristic and intense mockumentary What Really Happened feels like watching a couple break up online in real time (you know you’ve seen it!) with some of the best dramatic performances of the fest. And yes, you heard that right: It’s a dramatic mockumentary.

“I wanted to make something that captured real emotion, real thought,” said Stockdale in the Q&A. “The genesis of the idea was I had made a movie before this where one of the characters is portrayed as the bad guy, and I felt bad for that character afterward. So I thought why not make a story where we let everyone tell their own story instead.”

The biggest crowd-pleaser of the fest was Daniel J. Clark’s American Comic, a laugh-out-loud mockumentary about cancel culture and comedy starring Joe Kwaczala about two comics trying to rise up the ranks to the TBD Festival. This film had everyone laughing in their seats (I don’t remember the last time I cackled in a theater like this). And there’s a huge twist!

“If it was a real documentary, it would be obvious,” said Clark. “I’ve had people not know the twist, and that’s always exciting for me. My hope is that you don’t catch on until later.”

The River Valley Film Festival continues through July 20.