Virginia (1998)

Set and filmed in Denver, Virginia lifts its story out of the skyscrapers, red-brick houses and mountain skyline of Denver. Nineteen-year-old Charles Sarrison is determined to become a physicist and could care less about anything or anyone else, including his humanitarian mother, who is trying desperately to hold together a failing day-care center for disadvantaged kids. One day Charles begrudgingly takes some day-care kids on a field trip and comes across Virginia Culver, a beautiful young woman whom he has known since high school. She is alone, crying, and trying to conceal an inflamed left cheek. Charles invites her along on the trip, and the two begin a relationship that eventually changes Charles' life in a profound way, when Virginia reveals the violent mysteries of her past. Her secrets teach Charles to appreciate his own good fortune. Virginia's original jazz score mixes the more traditional elements of Wynton Marsalis with the more experimental stylings of Pat Metheny.