‘THE CLEARING’
Storms always find you in locally shot sci-fi drama
In 1908, an asteroid landed near Siberia’s Nizhnyaya Tunguska River with enough force to topple most trees within miles of the crash site. More than 100 years later, Pittsburgh-based filmmaker Stephanie Trainer read a National Geographic article about “the Tunguska event” and was intrigued by the mystical (and sometimes religious) significance bestowed upon what was then viewed simply as a brilliant fireball that fell from the heavens.
“People would talk about their own version of what happened,” Trainer told the Post-Gazette last week. “All that lore came out of it. I thought it would be interesting if I could capture something out of that.”
She ended up co-writing a screenplay about a storm that won’t stop raging over Appalachia and the young woman whose tortured past is dredged up after being trapped in its eye. The final product, which Trainer directed and named “The Clearing,” was filmed throughout Western Pennsylvania in late 2019 and early 2020. It finally became available to rent or buy on Amazon Prime Video in early January.
“The Clearing” follows Ivana (Amna Geko), who has been studying this strange weather phenomenon with suspicious similarities to another storm that had a generationally devastating impact on her family. While attempting to travel around its circumference with her research partner, Steven (David Bielewicz), Ivana blacks out and suddenly wakes up alone in a clearing.
Her only way out of the storm’s epicenter is to work through her own trauma with an assist from information gleaned from the loved ones of those who also presumably found themselves in the same inexplicable situation.
Believe it or not, Trainer didn’t take any inspiration for “The Clearing” from the 2018 Alex Garland thriller “Annihilation” or the 2014 Jeff VanderMeer novel of the same name on which it was loosely based. While both stories follow women navigating a sci-fi bubble while grappling with their own demons, Trainer began writing her movie’s script shortly after moving to Pittsburgh in 2013.
She and Karly Nykwest, her “Clearing” co-writer and Cunning Folk Films partner, were hoping to shoot their film near Tunguska before realizing that wouldn’t be logistically or financially feasible. They opted to keep the production close to home, specifically in and around Trainer’s late grandparents’ house in Edinboro. A few pickup shots and extra scenes were filmed closer to the Pittsburgh area.
Trainer placed a casting call in entertainment trade publication Backstage to find her Ivana, which is how she stumbled across the Marylandbased Geko. The Towson University graduate had never acted in a feature film before, but Trainer felt she had the chops for this demanding part based on a video of Geko captivating an in-person audience with nothing but her natural storytelling abilities.
Geko is truly put through the wringer while attempting to sell Ivana’s increasing desperation, internal anguish and physical deterioration. Trainer decided to shoot Ivana’s scenes in order so Geko could better pinpoint Ivana’s rapidly changing psychology.
“As I prepared for the role, I definitely thought of, ‘OK, I should be in some shape for this and have the endurance to do all the hobbling I did!’ ” Geko said. “As the days went by, I could get more in the mental state she was in.”
Ivana is haunted throughout “The Clearing” by visions of her father and the psychosis that ultimately led to his horrifying demise. That storm-induced apparition is played by Eric Swader, a Cleveland native who has been
bouncing around the Steel City’s filmmaking community since he moved here about a decade ago.
Swader drew inspiration from films with characters “that function as ghosts for the protagonists” like Steven Soderbergh’s “Solaris” and Martin Scorsese’s “Shutter Island.” He ultimately decided that the storm’s true purpose is to shatter Ivana’s “illusion of time” and force her to make peace with all those unpleasant memories from her childhood.
“The things that we suffer hang onto us regardless of the passage of time,” Swader posited. “There are things we have to face and confront, and this removes the element of choice for her.”
Heady ideas like that would have been impossible to communicate without Nykwest, who in addition to co-writing “The Clearing” also served as the film’s editor and post-production supervisor. He had the unenviable task of cobbling together seemingly disparate scenes into a cohesive mystery that also effectively communicated the film’s themes.
“Because we were working with a nonlinear narrative with aspects of time travel, there were a lot of different ways to potentially cut scenes together,” Nykwest said via email. “As an editor, I loved this. I love getting to play with chronology and finding different pathways to narrative logic, so getting to experiment with Steph on this was a lot of fun.”
Their finished film began a multi-year festival run at the 2021 London Independent Film Festival before finally dropping on Amazon last month. Trainer is currently “negotiating with several platforms” that could also potentially host “The Clearing” and said she’ll keep everyone updated about where else it ends up via Cunning Folk Films’ website and social media channels.
Geko recommended “The Clearing” for anyone who generally enjoys psychological thrillers that may be “a little bit different than the mainstream.” Swader sees it as yet another example of “what we can do regionally” and more evidence that when Pittsburghers work together, “we can tell some stories that are worth watching.”
“It’s a good showcase on a small scale of just how talented I think people in this community are,” Trainer added. “The Pittsburgh indie film scene is really robust, and there are some many undiscovered gems at work here.”