Penn State students put Centre County in the spotlight with new film

A new, entirely Penn State student-produced film is showing one night only at The State Theatre this week.

“The Fallen,” a psychological thriller that charts the lives of a group of young men and women in the aftermath of a contagion pandemic, is less an apocalyptic disaster film and more a character study on dealing with isolation and grief, said writer and director Grant Donghia.

Donghia, a 2017 State High graduate and Penn State junior, said he came up with the idea for the film his senior year of high school for a class project in State High English teacher Allison Becker’s AP English class. Though he “quickly threw a ... project together” using that idea in high school, he ended up revisiting it his freshman year of college at Penn State.

“When I was making (‘The Fallen’), I was like, ‘I need something outside of the classroom, I don’t want to be graded on this, this is specifically just for me to explore myself as a creative,’” he said.

He started writing the script for a movie that year, and people he interned with in New York’s film industry over the summer read over the draft and gave notes. When Donghia came back to Penn State in August for his sophomore year, he and his production team of producer Lilly Adams, cinematographer Gareth Ng (a State High graduate), casting head DJ Etzi and sound designer Carson Spence cast the film and “flew through production literally until the May of finals week.”

Drawing inspiration from director Ryan Murphy (“Glee,” “American Horror Story,” “Pose”), Donghia and his team selected a cast that was over 50% women, people of color and LGBTQ students. As a member of the LGBTQ community, Donghia said it was “super important” to reflect that community and other minority communities in his filmmaking. But at the same time, he said, he doesn’t use the 50% rule to pander to a false sense of “diversity.”

“It just happened that (the actors cast) were the most talented people that auditioned,” he said.

Over the nine months of filming, the cast and crew visited many places in Centre County to scout locations and film scenes. The “majority” of filming was done in the Scotia Barrens in Halfmoon Township, said Donghia, because of its remote feel and pristine landscape and the rest were filmed in local towns or areas 40 minutes outside State College.

“What I think I benefit from being from the local area is I know locations that other people would never even know about and I wanted to use my knowledge of these really small, niche places around town that I know are perfect filming places,” he said.

The wild, desolate landscape of the Scotia Barrens captured the feeling of isolation Donghia wanted to play out among his characters.

Covering themes like distress, grieving and betrayal, “it’s really a big character study of what humans do when they’re isolated in the woods for three-plus years,” he said. Though the movie explains the pathogen that wipes out most humans, “(the movie) is not about the sickness. It’s about the people in the woods. ... During the film, the entire time you’re trying to figure out, are they insane, are they sick, or are they both?”

For Donghia, some of the themes explored in the film are personal. After his mother passed away in 2011, he wanted to capture a stage of grief he felt wasn’t portrayed in movies.

One of the main characters in “The Fallen” goes through a grief odyssey of her own, he said, as she struggles to remember her entire family who was killed in the virus outbreak. Her grief becomes a central character motivation, as she pushes the group to go on a big supply run in order to find a photograph of her family.

“In film, people always talk about the immediate, right-after part of grief, or the way, way, way in the future (part),” he said. “There’s a weird transitional period (of grief) I felt ... of like the fading of memories, so I really wanted to focus on that nostalgia, kind of blending in the woods.”

Though the entire cast and crew of “The Fallen” is made up of former and current Penn State students, all the work they did was unpaid and separate from any university class or extracurricular, Donghia said. All production, editing and public relations were handled by Penn State students.

“We just wanted to make something that showcased our abilities to give us exposure as the creatives that we are,” he said. “I think it’s really cool to see what we kind of scrapped together on our own.”

“The Fallen” premiers at The State Theatre in downtown State College on Thursday at 8 p.m. For tickets, visit thestatetheatre.org/the-fallen or call the box office at 272-0606.

Sarah Paez

Centre Daily Times

814-231-4616

Sarah Paez covers Centre County communities, government and town and gown relations for the Centre Daily Times. She studied English and Spanish at Cornell University and grew up outside of Washington, D.C.