Mountain Meadows movie being filmed

Filming is under way in Canada on a Western romance set in the context of the Mountain Meadows Massacre — one of the darkest and most controversial events in Mormon history.

"September Dawn" is being touted as "a love story set during a tense encounter between a wagon train of settlers that faces off against a renegade Mormon group." Starring Jon Voight and Lolita Davidovich, the project began filming earlier this month in Alberta and is scheduled to shoot through mid-September.

Voight, the Academy Award-winning actor whose recent film credits include "Ali," "Pearl Harbor," "The Rainmaker" and "Mission: Impossible" is cast as the leader of the renegade party, with Davidovich playing the role of a wagon train member who stands up to the attackers.

Christopher Cain, who directed "Young Guns" and the "Magnificent Seven" TV series, is writer and director for the project, with a budget of about $11 million.

Few additional details about the film are known, including whether Cain based his story on historical accounts of the massacre or whether he drew the details from a spate of recent books and films about the event.

Kathleen McInnis, publicity director for "September Dawn," told the Deseret Morning News that Cain and other production people are "so busy with what's going on on the set right now, there's no time at this point" to answer in-depth questions about research for the film's screenplay or what sources were used in writing it. Such queries "may have to wait for a few weeks until we can get towards the end of production."

Long viewed by historians as the darkest chapter in the history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the massacre of 120 men, women and children by LDS militiamen and Paiute Indians on Sept. 11, 1857, involved Arkansas emigrants following the Old Spanish Trail when they were attacked in Mountain Meadows, north of St. George. Seventeen children survived the attack.

LDS Church officials, including President Gordon B. Hinckley, have worked with state and local authorities and historians in recent years to assuage lingering animosity and memorialize the victims. The church erected a monument overlooking the site of the massacre in 1999 and held a dedication ceremony to which descendants of those involved were invited. It also reburied bones of 29 victims unearthed during construction of the monument in a separate ceremony.

"All who knew firsthand about what occurred here are long since gone. Let the book of the past be closed. Let peace come into our hearts," President Hinckley told participants.