Two men dressed warmly stand on a frozen lake with an ice auger and with a red pickup truck in the background.
Ritchie Gordon, left, and David Duran in a scene from 'February.'
Director Nathan Deming didn’t know how lucky he was when he shot much of his film February on a frozen lake near Tomah, Wisconsin, in 2022. The ice was thick enough to support trucks and cars driving on it. This year with its warm winter would have been much different. “I didn’t realize it would be a hard thing to get a frozen lake in Wisconsin in the middle of winter,” says Deming, a Tomah native, in a phone interview from Los Angeles, where he’s now based.
The film, which will screen April 7 at The Marquee at Union South (as part of the program “Wisconsin's Own Two Handers”), is the second of a narrative series Deming envisions depicting Wisconsin in each month of the year (January appeared in the fest in 2022).
February is the story of Miguel, a young Mexican immigrant who is living with his sister in freezing Tomah, working maintenance and cleaning at a motel. Miguel is so disassociated from his surroundings he barely responds to his sister and brother-in-law. But when he becomes intrigued by ice fishing, his family finds him a local mentor to take him out on the ice.
“Mentor” may be too strong a word for the unpredictable ice fisher who consents to take Miguel with him. Ritchie Gordon, the Tomah man who plays him, almost steals the show. Deming found Gordon through a Craigslist ad — he had no acting background, but he knew ice fishing.
The film’s director of photography, Leo Purman, is originally from Milwaukee, but most of the rest of the cast and crew was from L.A. They were “really excited to come here, even in February,” says Deming. “Wisconsin is really beautiful in winter — in small doses.” Filming on the ice took “some learning from all of us,” with most of the crew feeling fairly nervous.
The story unfurls slowly, with deft, economic visual storytelling. In that way, Deming was inspired by British filmmaker Mike Leigh, head of the London Film School when Deming attended. “I loved his style,” says Deming, and the sense that “you’re watching three-dimensional people unfold in front of you.”
Deming calls the film “fairly ambitious for the size of our resources,” and says he thinks it looks like it had a bigger budget than they had. “I’m proud of what we did on the money we had.”
See more of our 2024 Wisconsin Film Fest coverage here.
