From Friday, April 24 to Sunday, April 26, the film “Winter Hymns” will be showing at Micon Cinemas in the Oakwood Mall and will also be premiering at the 2026 Wisconsin Film Festival.

The showings will be at 7 p.m. on Friday and Saturday as well as 3 p.m. on Sunday. 

The film “Winter Hymns” follows a palliative care doctor as she meets with several dying patients and their families over the course of a day. 

“Winter Hymns” was directed by Nathan Deming, who is originally from Tomah, Wisconsin, but currently resides in L.A. He still comes back to Wisconsin frequently to make movies. 

Deming wanted to create this film because his dad has been a palliative care doctor in Eau Claire for the past 10 years. 

“I wasn’t really familiar with it before he did that, and I got very interested in that world and how palliative care and hospice worlds view the world and how they are treated,” Deming said.

The film takes place in Wisconsin and was filmed completely in Menomonie using an all Midwest cast. 

Nathan says it is important that the film took place in Wisconsin to show there’s more to the Midwest than the jokes made about Midwest residents. 

“I want people to see the Midwest and Wisconsin as a place where real stories and cinema come out of, not just some joke or silly place,” Deming said.

Not only was the film created entirely in Wisconsin, several students were involved, including two UW-Eau Claire students that helped in the creation of the film: Marianne Lear and Colton Nash. 

Colton Nash is a third-year theatre arts comprehension student. And while he is an actor, he was the production assistant on the film. This meant he was filling in any gaps on the set, such as taking lunch orders, moving equipment and running lines with actors. 

Deming had reached out to theatre majors when Nash was a sophomore, Nash said. Deming wanted people to read through a script that he had written. Nash was one of the people who helped read through it and then a couple months later, Deming made him aware of Eau Claire Filmmaker Meetings that he was beginning to host. 

Nash proceeded to attend these meetings, which he said helped him to get to know Deming more and eventually get offered the production assistant role for Winter Hymns. 

This was Nash’s first time on a movie set, and he really enjoyed getting to experience a real movie set. 

“It was very interesting to see how things functioned on a more professional level than filming things with friends in my backyard,” Nash said.

When asked what the film was about to him, Nash gave a similar response to the official synopsis of the film. He said the perspective was different from what you normally see with medical films. 

“You so often see how a diagnosis affects a patient, but you don’t really think about how breaking that news affects the doctor,” Nash said.

Nathan hopes that this film will help portray to people the strange beauty that most hospice and palliative care workers describe. He also hopes that people from Wisconsin will be able to resonate with the characters depicted in the film. 

In addition to the Eau Claire showings, there will also be showings of the film in its filming location Menomonie. On Sunday April 19th, there will be a showing at 4 p.m. and 7 p.m. at Menomonie 7 Theatre. 

Tickets for the Menomonie showings are on sale now and the Eau Claire showings will be on sale soon. Lemke can be reached at [email protected].