A little girl gazes at Lake Superior, searching for her father who she believes sails the lake in a Viking ship looking for her. Abandoned at birth in Virginia, Minnesota, she comes to live in a mansion that has been turned into a school for girls from troubled homes. The girls in the home are three to four years older than her, and she is seen as something of a mascot. A big believer in native American myths and Viking lore, the precocious eight-year-old calls herself Virginia Minnesota, and one day Virginia sets sail in a rag tag raft looking for her father who she believes lives on an enchanted island on Lake Superior. …
An independent movie company from Manassas, Virginia will spend a week filming in Grand Marais from September 12 – 17, said the movie’s producer Michael Stine.
Called Virginia Minnesota, the film has a budget of $500,000 and will have a cast of 25-26 people.
“My son is the writer and director. He graduated from film school eight years ago and we have produced many short films that have done very well at film festivals, but this is our first full length feature film,” said Stine, adding that even though the budget is low for a feature length film, it doesn’t mean that this isn’t an ambitious project with the goal to make it to major distribution. “We do want to make our investors a profit,” Stine said.
Three weeks of filming will be done in Duluth. Some of that will take place in Chester Park and some at Glensheen Mansion. Locally, some scenes will be filmed at Drury Lane Bookstore and at World’s Best Donuts. The Grand Marais marina and surrounding harbor will also be used extensively.
No one in the cast is famous, but Stine said there would be several recognizable faces with TV and movie credits that will have familiar faces to viewers.
When asked why he picked Grand Marais as a site to do some of the filming, Stine said, “My son was in L.A. last fall and he was talking to an actress from Minneapolis who encouraged him to drive through Minnesota on his way back home. He did and he was knocked out by the beauty and the friendly people he met.”
There are 15 speaking roles in the film with two major parts. In a July 13 phone interview, Stine said he was in the last stages of finalizing contracts with the two lead actors.
“We had 3,000 submissions for these two roles. We are really excited about the two women we have selected to play the lead characters. The movie really starts when four of the women who had lived for a time at the mansion get back together for a reunion of sorts. They have been named in the will and they go back for the reading. It is 15 years after they have left the mansion and one woman who lives in Grand Marais doesn’t want to go back, but one of the three women drives from Duluth to get her and they work through bad memories and regain some of their lost innocence as they travel back to Larsmont Bluffs. The ending is a surprise. The movie has some fantastic elements to it, and it should be entertaining.
“We hope when we are filming in Grand Marais that people will mill around and watch us. We need people for the background, so if you want to be seen in a movie, this might be a good chance,” Stine said.
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