Youngstown native Ben Garchar didn’t have much background working with sports stories, but the chance to be an editor on the documentary “Rouge” appealed to him for other reasons.

“I’m sort of Midwest at heart and blue collar at heart,” Garchar said. “That’s my background and that’s my training as well. It’s nice to work on these American underdog stories that can get overlooked. The more that we’re showing a full picture of the entire country and a wide range of experience, it’s the best anyone can do.”

“Rouge,” which has its world premiere this weekend at the Cleveland International Film Festival, looks at the basketball team at River Rouge High School, located south of Detroit. In the 1960s, it was the first high school team in Michigan with an all Black starting five, and the school was as dominant in 1960s Michigan high school basketball as the Boston Celtics were in the NBA that decade.

The Panthers have won 14 state championships, more than any other high school in Michigan, but plant closures and economic decline impacted the community and the schools.

Director Hamoody Jaafar follows the team as it tries to recapture its basketball glory with the help of some highly touted seniors and a transfer from Cleveland who is the son of one of River Rouge’s most illustrious alumni.

Of course, documentary filmmakers can’t script a Hollywood ending like a feature film, and River Rouge ends up facing a foe more insurmountable than any rival high school team.

Garcher, who grew up on Youngstown’s South Side, has worked over the last 14 years on dozens of documentary shorts and features as an editor, writer, director and / or cinematographer, including “An Act of Worship” and “Feast of the Epiphany” as well as working as an editor on the 2017 feature film “Radium Girls.”

Several experiences growing up in the Mahoning Valley fueled his future career path, from playing around with an old camera that belonged to his father and taking a darkroom photography class at Cardinal Mooney High School to getting his first DVD player.

“The combination of that darkroom class and just watching more movies, seeing the world through a lens, that’s really what sparked everything for me,” Garchar said.

After graduating from Cardinal Mooney in 2004, Garchar went to Wright State University, where he studied filmmaking with acclaimed documentary filmmakers Julia Reichart and Steven Bognar (Garchar was camera operator on their 2010 Oscar-nominated short film “The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant”).

With “Rouge” Garchar was brought in as an editor in 2022 after nearly all of the footage had been shot.

“What interested me is it’s a Midwest story, post industrial,” he said. “There are a lot of similarities between Detroit and Youngstown. I hadn’t heard of River Rouge before. A program with so much history, I thought I would have heard at least a snippet of it. And the older guys who do interviews, everyone has a compelling story to tell in compelling ways.”

Jaafar had a strong vision for the film, and it was Garchar’s and the other editor’s job to find that vision in the hours and hours of footage shot during the basketball season along with archival footage, some of it more than 60 years old.

“It requires a lot of patience, just whittling down and whittling down,” Garchar said.

The rough cut ran about two hours, and the version that will be shown in Cleveland clocks in at 93 minutes. The filmmakers were making changes in the last week or so and added information about where River Rouge finished in its just completed 2023-24 season.

Garchar, who lives in New York, won’t be able to be in Cleveland this weekend for its premiere, but he is looking forward to seeing it in Detroit later this month. Those who can’t make it to Cleveland for the showing on Saturday and Sunday can rent the movie to watch at home between April 14 and 21 as part of the festival’s CIFF Streams program.

“There’s no distributor yet,” Garchar said. “Hopefully it will continue to screen at festivals and hopefully it will generate interest and on a platform for a wider audience, whatever that might be.”

If you go …

WHAT: World premiere of the documentary “Rouge” at the Cleveland International Film Festival.

WHEN: 2:20 p.m. Saturday and 9:40 a.m. Sunday.

WHERE: KeyBank State Theatre, Playhouse Square, 1515 Euclid Ave., Cleveland.

HOW MUCH: Tickets are $18 and can be purchased in advance at clevelandfilm.org and by calling 877-304-3456.

ALSO: “Rouge” also can be viewed at home between April 14 and 21 as part of the CIFF Streams program. Streaming links can be purchased at www.clevelandfilm.org/films/rouge.