Nathan Deming just wrapped production on Winter Hymns, his latest independent drama. And for him, it was important to film it entirely in Wisconsin.
“We’ve been trying to make this film for years,” says Deming, a Tomah, Wisconsin native. “It’s about performance – deeply rooted in Wisconsin culture and people – and I’m so proud of what this cast and crew accomplished.”
Shot in the northwestern Wisconsin city of Menomonie (population about 17,000), the project brings together Midwest acting talent including Spring Green resident Colleen Madden, Chicago’s Tara Mallen and Milwaukee-born and UWM graduate Chiké Johnson.
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Deming says he’s especially excited about getting lead actress Madden’s performance “out into the world. … She’s super talented and has a really interesting presence.”
Winter Hymns, set in a single hospital room over a busy winter day, follows a palliative care physician, played by Madden, as she interacts with dying and terminally ill patients. “My dad, who is retired, was a palliative physician for the last 12 years of his career,” Deming says. “I found it very intriguing. I wrote this film about six or seven years ago while living in LA.”
But Deming says he wanted to root the movie in Wisconsin. “It’s all about these characters who are dying and trapped in their situations, and I wanted it to be a deeply empathetic movie and one that reminded viewers of people they know in Wisconsin.”
The 36-year-old Deming, who studied film in London, has lived in Los Angeles for more than a decade. But during his return to his home state, he’s done more than shoot a movie. He was a driving force in Action Wisconsin’s initiative to create a film office and tax incentives in Wisconsin, which succeeded this July.
“I got more excited about the possibilities here,” he says.
For example, filming in Menomonie, “I basically found a perfect location that we could convert,” he says. “And what I thought would be a minor benefit of choosing the location turned out to be a huge one. UW-Stout is right there and has a video production program. Man, these kids are some of the hardest working I’ve seen. That was really fun.”
Deming says Winter Hymns exemplifies the creative energy building across Wisconsin’s independent film community with the state’s new film and television tax incentives, set to take effect in January.
The provision in the biennial budget bill, signed by Gov. Tony Evers on July 3, established a Wisconsin film office within the Department of Tourism and launched a multi-million-dollar tax incentive program that has been heralded as a long overdue potential catalyst for attracting movie and television production to America’s Dairyland.
“This is a big opportunity for the state,” Deming says. “We’ve seen places like New Mexico explode because of film incentives. You get a hit show like Breaking Bad – that show only went to New Mexico because of the film incentives.
“I’m really excited because I feel like film is getting democratized,” he adds. “It’s been centralized in LA for so long. Now, you don’t have to be there. I’m like ‘Why don’t I make something for Wisconsin if I’m from Wisconsin?’”
With incentives on the horizon and the LA-centric film industry undergoing massive changes and new lows, Deming says the timing is perfect for Wisconsin to begin to make its mark as a spot for filming movies and television shows.
A variety of factors are responsible for LA’s decline, Deming says. “First there was the pandemic, and now we have streamers rising in prominence and completely shaking up the whole business model of the industry,” he says. “We’ve also had multiple strikes from different unions. Basically, nobody knows how to make money in film anymore in LA.” Technological advances have also played a part, such as being able to easily share digital files.
But it’s film incentives that are having perhaps the biggest impact on the industry, Deming says. Wisconsin’s biennial budget provides funding for a position in the new film office and offers up to $5 million in film production and investment tax credits during each fiscal year. Neighboring Illinois brought in $653 million in film production revenue in 2024, along with estimated wages of $351 million and 18,200 estimated hires in the industry, excluding extras. Minnesota provides up to $25 million in credits annually.
Film incentives have become a driving force for production companies in deciding where a film will be made, Deming says. “It allows productions to stretch their budgets, and the city or the state gets the benefit of having a movie made there, which can be huge for obvious cultural reasons. Also, in the short term there’s money that’s just being parachuted in.”
He noted that the recent filming of the movie A Wisconsin Christmas Pie led to the spending of more than $600,000 in Door County during a time of year where tourism in the area drops off dramatically.
“It’s to the point where Hollywood won’t even film anywhere that doesn’t offer incentives,” Deming says, noting that, until recent legislative action, Wisconsin had been one of 13 states without any incentives. “It was basically like we were losing a game we weren’t even playing in.” Deming was among those who testified in favor of including film incentives in the Wisconsin budget.
This won’t be Wisconsin’s first film office, though. The original office closed in July 2005, and a film incentive program ended nearly a decade later. Deming is hopeful they will stay around this time.
“We were too far ahead of the game. We adopted it before other states perfected the model. That hurt us,” Deming says. “It felt like there was no infrastructure and no support. I don’t want that to happen to the next generation of filmmakers. We train 500 to 600 film graduates a year, but most of them leave Wisconsin. That was the other reason it felt like this was a no-brainer.”
Deming says although certainly crucial, the benefits of filming in Wisconsin go far beyond incentives.
“First of all, the cost of production is way cheaper in Wisconsin than LA or New York,” Deming says. “We have lots of talent here. We have lots of crew and actors. I was a little bit nervous about filming in Menomonie because I wondered if I could find enough crew, but we ended up having 60 or 70 people touch the film. We had no shortage of people who were passionate, hard-working and rose to the occasion. That’s true of the entire state.”
A change of seasons also makes Wisconsin well-suited for filming, he says. “It’s beautiful to film here. There are really cool locations. On top of that we have a culture that I think is really marketable.”
Winter Hymns was made under Deming’s Nobody Pictures. The film is in post-production as Deming and his team develop plans on how it will be released.
“I’m eyeing a couple of film festivals that are really important to me – the Milwaukee Film Festival and the Wisconsin Film Festival in Madison,” Deming says.
Deming’s other film projects include Speaking in Tongues and the ambitious and ongoing Year Project, a 12- part series of films named for each month of the year and set in the same small town in Wisconsin. The films are written and directed by Deming, who hopes to tell an interweaving series of stories that explore multiple strata of society through different perspectives and experiences, all with a common backdrop.
“I want to capture Wisconsin’s places and people over time,” Deming says. “It’s deliberately slow. I’m going to do this every few years. I’m really excited about it. I’ve done two already. February was the one I just took around the state, and I had a lot of fun doing it. I’ll do that all over again when I move on to March. I’m really excited about the potential for cinema here.”
