Both Films Sell Out ReadingFilmFEST, One Costs Less Than a Trip to Sundance

Reading, PA (The Hollywood Times) October 13, 2026 — Martin “Marty” McGowan did the math before he submitted Left Unsaid anywhere. Sending one person to Sundance costs more than $10,000. His entire feature, counting the crowdfunding, his own savings and the laptop that died mid-edit, cost less than that. “Let’s pretend Left Unsaid is amazing,” he told The Hollywood Times. “It’s the best movie you’ve ever seen, and movie B has Robert De Niro in it. We’ve already lost.”

So McGowan kept his film on his home turf; in Reading Pennsylvania. Left Unsaid, about a brother and sister reeling from their mother’s sudden death, screens in ReadingFilmFEST’s Made in Reading lineup. So does Robert J. Morgalo’s Children of a Fatherless Child. Both screenings sold out weeks ahead, which surprised both filmmakers. “I’m like, ‘Is that even possible at a film fest?’” Morgalo said. “Lightning struck twice.” Talk to them for an hour and the reason comes into focus. Berks County has quietly built what independent film needs most and can rarely afford: a community willing to show up in front of the camera, behind it and in the seats.

McGowan casts from Reading’s theater scene. He once watched a 17-year-old perform The Crucible and decided on the spot she belonged in his movie; a few years later she starred in Ava, his first feature. His Left Unsaid lead, Andrea Keck, had never acted on film. She works at a dog kennel, and when McGowan met her at Panera to pitch the role, she was, he later learned, just waiting for him to stop talking so she could say yes. “We all have nine-to-fives,” McGowan said. “Your cast and crew are excited because they don’t do this every day.”

The core team was about eight people. McGowan made Ava for $200, possible only because the actors volunteered and he already owned the house. For Left Unsaid he set a $2,500 Indiegogo goal to cover a $100-a-day per diem, the same for everyone on set. “If my boom operator’s not there, it doesn’t matter if my actor just won the Oscar,” he said. “We’re not gonna hear it.” The campaign closed at more than 190 percent of its goal.

Andrea Keck plays Brooke in Left Unsaid

McGowan, 30, describes his career as a chain reaction he never could have planned. His producer Santo Marabella urged him to submit Ava to ReadingFilmFEST, which forced him to finish it. Ava premiered at the 2023 festival, sold out and won awards he didn’t know he’d been nominated for. Sight & Sound, the Lancaster faith-based theater company, saw it and hired him for its film Great Awakening, a job he says turned his finances around and paid for Left Unsaid.

Support kept arriving from unexpected places. Jeremy Wolf, a high school classmate, made amateur films as a kid before building a fulfilling career in another field. When Ava came out, he was glad to see McGowan had stuck with filmmaking, and when the chance came to join Left Unsaid, he said he just wanted to make it as good as it could be. He was on set more than half the shooting days, before and after shifts at his day job, making sure the cast and crew were taken care of.

McGowan on set locally

Peter Phillips, a performer who has been part of the area’s theater scene for years, was going through a transition in his life and had written “be an executive producer” at the top of his list of goals when he came across a post an actor had shared about the film. He donated, and he and McGowan didn’t meet in person until more than eight months later. “You can’t write that,” McGowan said. “You can’t plan that.”

Morgalo, a retired Army combat medic who served in Iraq, moved to Berks County in 2000, and his daughter was born at Reading Hospital. He came to filmmaking late and fast. In 2020, after losing his mother-in-law to COVID, he wrote a short film in April and had it shot by July. Then he looked at the upstate New York shoot planned for his first feature and asked his team to find locations in Reading instead. That October he shot the feature there in 15 days with Peter Greene of Pulp Fiction, Federico Castelluccio of The Sopranos and Richard Kline of Three’s Company. He says the move saved more than 50 percent of what the film would have cost in New York.

Morgalo and crew filming in Spain

Children of a Fatherless Child traveled farther, with scenes in Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Fort Myers, Havana and Spain, but its Reading scenes came almost free. Franklin’s Diner, sticker-covered walls and all, opened its doors at no cost. Centro Hispano, across the street from the theater where the film will screen, let the crew in on a day the office was closed. A trailer park scene Morgalo hoped to shoot in Los Angeles proved too expensive to film there. Pennsylvania’s film tax credit still trails New York’s, and Morgalo has been pushing to raise it, but he argues the savings on the ground more than close the gap. “Reading is just fertile ground,” he said.

He builds his own talent pipeline, too. After booking commercial work as a veteran, including a USAA spot with Rob Gronkowski, Morgalo launched a free eight-week acting course for veterans at Reading’s DoubleTree, which donated the space. About five of the 15 who took it now work in commercials and TV, and two or three appear in his diner scene. Jake Beers of the Allentown area, a former student, plays the film’s fourth lead, and many of its background actors came out of his local workshops.

Both filmmakers rave about what a short drive delivers. “You can go from the deepest, urbanest, spookiest alley from Spider-Man you’ve ever seen,” McGowan said, “all the way up to the middle of nowhere,” in about 20 minutes. The ash-scattering scene in Left Unsaid sits at a vista that is a 20-minute hike from a five-minute drive. Morgalo shot an entire Western in Berks County that passes for the mountains of Montana, and he once considered opening a film studio in Reading. McGowan offers one caveat: “Don’t bring the Avengers here and expect us to get rolling on it tomorrow, but pretty much everything below that.”

ReadingFilmFEST is the glue. The festival provides hotel rooms for visiting filmmakers, something both men say almost no one else does; Morgalo paid his own way to Tombstone, Arizona, for another festival. He has submitted a film nearly every year since 2020, calls the gathering “a family reunion” of returning filmmakers and new faces, and says every project he makes has the festival “in my headlights.” McGowan, who once volunteered there, sees the sellouts as a win for the whole arts scene. If even half those ticket buyers have never been to GoggleWorks, they now know it shows unusual films all year. “I had no idea this was here,” he remembers guests telling him.

Neither man is in it for the money. Morgalo can’t attend this year, and some of his own executive producers couldn’t get tickets before the screening sold out. McGowan’s composer is delivering the final score this week, which makes Sunday’s screening the first public look at the finished film. He already knows where his next one will premiere. “I wanna sell out again,” he said.

McGowan on set locally in the funeral scene

Children of a Fatherless Child screens Saturday, November 7, at 9:30 PM in IMAX Theater 1. Morgalo plans a U.S. release on Father’s Day weekend, opening June 18. He is targeting theaters in seven cities, from New York to Los Angeles, and hopes to reach 500 churches before streaming. The timing fits a film he began writing when he learned his father, who left when Morgalo was 10 months old, was dying of cancer. Left Unsaid screens Sunday, November 8, at 12:30 PM at GoggleWorks Center for the Arts. ReadingFilmFEST runs November 6–8 in Reading, Pennsylvania, and the full program is at readingfilmfest.com/program.

The Reading Film Office and more about the location here.