Director Nathan Deming hails from Neenah, Wisconsin. He lives in L.A. now, but returns frequently to Wisconsin — to make films. Deming’s film February, which won a Golden Badger Award in the 2024 Wisconsin Film Festival, is part of a projected 12-month series of films based in Wisconsin. His latest, Winter Hymns, playing in this year’s festival on April 12 at the Bartell Theatre, is set in, and filmed in, Wisconsin, starring what Deming calls “an all Midwest/Wisconsin cast.”
The film is a meditative, unflinching look at a day in the life of a palliative care doctor — played with sensitivity and restraint by American Players Theatre veteran Colleen Madden. It’s set in a purposely un-named part of Wisconsin, in just one room — the doctor’s office — which becomes, Deming says, “sort of like limbo.”
Deming tells Isthmus he became interested in the topic of caring for those approaching death because his father, a family doctor, switched to palliative care late in his career. When Deming was younger, he remembers his family not wanting to talk about it, but now, as a filmmaker, he finds his father’s work strikes themes he finds interesting — “exploring people under the most intense situation possible.”
He wrote the film seven years ago and tried to assemble a production several times, but worried the film was “too experimental.” His filming of February in Wisconsin in the winter of 2022 was instrumental. Deming became involved with the group Action! Wisconsin, working to establish Film Wisconsin, a film tax incentive recently signed into law by Gov. Tony Evers as part of the 2025-2026 budget. That, along with February, led him to meet more Wisconsin-based crew members and actors — that helped get this production off the ground.
Deming acknowledges that Winter Hymns is “a hard movie to watch in a lot of ways, but hopefully edifying by the end. There is value in thinking about these things.”
His ongoing interest is “trying to capture Wisconsin personalities on screen.”
Winter Hymns includes outstanding performances by Flora Coker, a founding member of Milwaukee’s Theatre X, as a woman with dementia, and Ericka Kreutz, a Racine-born actress who’s appeared in Better Call Saul and The Handmaid’s Tale, as her daughter who is desperately trying to look after her as well as hold down a job and take care of her own family.
APT’s Sarah Day turns in a controlled performance as an English teacher coping with the psychological difficulty of signing power of attorney paperwork.
“I grew up watching Sarah Day at APT,” Deming says, “so it was a lot of fun to work with her.”
Deming uses non-actors, too. Thaddeus Sykora, who plays Jared, a young lineman with an unnamed cancer that also killed his father and grandfather, is in real life a dairy farmer from Bloomer, Wisconsin. He rented Deming the pickup truck used in February; this is his first acting role. Sykora’s sad eyes really tell his story — “after they started the surgery they basically sewed me right back up and told me there was nothing they could do” — and his dialogue reflects a taciturn Midwestern acceptance. “So…you only meet with dying people,” he says to Madden, heartbreakingly. The performance is all the more impressive because Sykora woke up at 3:30 a.m. to milk the cows before filming for nine hours, Deming says.
Ironically, a film that Deming originally worried would not take up 90 minutes now clocks in at 2:36. “But the pace felt right and the time spent with the people felt right,” he says.
A slow, dialogueless opening scene of the office being cleaned before the doctor’s arrival makes it clear from the start that the movie requires the viewer’s attention, and sometimes, patience. “I like movies that tell you how to watch them,” says Deming.
Moreover, “I wanted to make a movie where I’m telling my story about Wisconsin and people in Wisconsin,” he says, and that “we have a diversity of kinds of people from different classes, different religions, different backgrounds. Maybe a little more diverse than you might think for Wisconsin.”
Deming and Madden will be on hand for a post screening Q & A.