Previously a location for crime thrillers “Mindhunter” and “Mayor of Kingstown,” the former SCI Greensburg prison property soon will grace screens once again.

Hempfield supervisors approved a Brooklyn and Toronto-based film company, Visual Inclination, to film at the site this fall.

The company will use the location for a 10- to 12-minute short film, “What Is Not Saved Will Be Lost,” about a man recovering from addiction who seeks forgiveness and redemption upon his imminent release from prison. They expect to film for three days.

Visual Inclination will pay $3,500 for use of the property.

“It goes towards the current upkeep of the facility, and towards the cost of the project and eventually towards tearing it down,” said Doug Weimer, chairman of the township’s board of supervisors.

The township is in the process of securing funding and establishing a timeline for demolition of the building.

The 350,000-square-foot prison was built to hold 900 inmates and once employed about 360 people. The state Department of Corrections announced in January 2013 it was closing the facility and another in Cambria County because of maintenance costs and a declining inmate population.

After the facility sat vacant for a decade, the township announced last year it would purchase the 96-acre property on South Grande Boulevard for $3.5 million with the intent to demolish the prison.

“I see it to be a beneficial move by the township supervisors to allow for this type of filming, which seems to be beneficial to the community, and also brings in a little bit of revenue,” Weimer said.

Humanizing addiction

The film’s main character seeks to reconnect with his daughter, who survived an abduction when she was young. The story is meant to paint an empathetic picture of the struggles of addiction and recovery, according to director and writer Julian De Zorzi.

“I’m trying to humanize our character, to say that this is not something that is easily condemned (or) that we should just throw people away. We should be dealing with this in a more humanist sort of way,” De Zorzi said. “We want it to stand as a film about hope, and to change and recalibrate the conversation around the disease of addiction, so that we can understand that it is a disease, it is a public health emergency that needs to be treated as such.”

The setting of the story was intentionally left vague because of the wide-ranging impact of drug addiction, he said.

“I purposely wrote it in such a way that it’s sort of like Anytown, USA,” he said. “We’re not going to have a sense of exactly where we are because this is sort of affecting all of us. It was important to me to sort of keep that ambiguous.”

“I think at this point, everybody knows somebody or is personally affected by these issues,” producer Laura Lonski said. “We think it’s a really relevant topic, and we are looking forward to giving a new lens to it.”

Filming connections

The prison site was ideal for the film, De Zorzi said.

“When we eventually found Greensburg, it sort of ticked all the boxes. It’s a really great location with a lot of character, and it perfectly aligned with the vision that I had when I was writing this,” he said.

“It had the perfect amount of wear and tear on it to give it the atmosphere we were looking for in the prison, but it wasn’t so decrepit that it looked like an abandoned prison,” Lonski added. “It had just enough to give it character.”

Next up will be a casting call. De Zorzi had wanted to secure the filming site before finding actors, he said.

“We wanted to get that squared away first before moving in and ramping up the rest of the preproduction process,” he said.

The Pittsburgh Film Office connected Visual Inclination with the site.

“They needed a closed prison to be able to make this come to life. SCI Greensburg fits the bill amazingly well,” said executive director Dawn Keezer. “We’re able to use these closed facilities to bring some more economic impact into the state.”

Inviting more filming into the region helps to support local businesses, she said.

“This is what the film office does — we bring work in, we work with filmmakers to get their vision on screen, because they’re going to hire local people and stay in local hotels and spend money in the area where they’re filming,” she said.

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