Hits the Silver Screen

Nancy Edmonds Hanson

Before network TV blockbusters dipped far into the North Coun-try, there was local public-access television. And before there was a Food Network, there were North Country cooks who took great pride in showing off their culinary creations on those local channels.That’s the premise of Fargo-Moorhead filmmaker Janet Brandau’s first solo project, “The Greater Cumberland County Cooking Show.” Set in a distant North Woods village – a fictitious variant of real small towns of the early 1970s – the 25-min-ute short film depicts the rivalry between two would-be local kitchen mavens competing on a rustic rural channel. The elder concocts unlikely local-foods originals like Apple, Spinach and Onion Tart and Mutton Rutabaga Hotdish. The younger prepares more familiar fare, barbecued ribs and other dishes that viewers seem considerably likelier to actually eat.
Their rivalry, cloaked in passive-aggressive niceness, threatens to dismantle their weekly appearances on WCAT, the low-power local-access station that broadcasts their show. Their differences are mediated by the patient TV station owner, who seeks to moderate their semi-polite war-fare.
“I’ve been thinking for a long time about the interconnections between food, friendship and community,” film-maker Brandau reflects. “The people we love most are sometimes the same ones who drive us crazy.”
The retired Minnesota State University Moorhead administrator has been musing about those ties and tangles since her days as a graduate student. Back then, she began writing what was to be a comic play set in Appalachia. Last year that notion transformed into the first film that she would write, direct, produce and act in herself. “I wore a ton of hats mostly because I didn’t have to pay myself,” she quips. (The rest of the cast and crew were paid through grants from the Minnesota State Arts Board and Duluth Film Festival and from her own pocket.)
Now, nearly two years later, “The Greater Cumberland County Cooking Show” is making the circuit of audiences who’ll recognize hallmarks of their culture – some with smiles, others with winces. Premiered at the 2024 Fargo Film Festival, the movie short has already completed a series of showings in eight Minnesota cities, with more to come. Soon it will be available for viewing on a website Janet is putting together – a prelude to its entry in upcoming film festivals across the U.S.
Raised on a farm near Appleton, Minnesota, Brandau originally set her sights, not on the silver screen, but on the stage. She majored in theatre at Concordia, later completing a master’s in the same field at NDSU and an MFA in creative writing at MSUM. For the next 10 years, she taught theatre, speech and film classes at Northland College in Thief River Falls, producing and directing 16 shows along the way, including two scripts she’d written herself. “I did everything, from costuming and props to directing,” she reports. It was a good background for what was to come.
She joined MSUM in 2000 as director of academic support programs, then went on to head Study Abroad, where she led student groups to 23 countries. Along the way she met MSUM film production professor Tom Brandau. “He was looking for a big old house where a film he produced in 2008 could be set. That turned out to be the home where I was living at the time,” Janet remembers.
That was the beginning of a fruitful collaboration. After marrying the next year, she became Tom’s leading collaborator in the series of short films they produced during every summer break … until 2021, when he died of cancer.Both Brandaus had retired in 2020, just as COVID turned the college campus upside down. At the time, Janet knew she too had cancer. “Tom’s cancer was incurable. Mine ultimately fell in the curable column.”
“Cumberland County” marks her stepping out on her own. But she didn’t have to do it alone. She was surrounded by family and friends – not only her daughter Kate Aarness, who plays several small parts in her mother’s film, but a trio of her late husband’s film production students, including assistant director Simone LeClaire (who edited the film), director of photography Christian Calabrese (also the coloist and drone operator) and gaffer Bill Straub. She and Kate wrote and performed the music that bridges time and space between the film’s three scenes; they recorded the soundtrack in David Hansen’s sound studio on Pelican Lake.
Janet tracked down the rest of her quartet of actors in the Twin Cities. Thomas Draskovic, who plays the resourceful low-power TV station manager, was on the board of the Guthrie Theatre. Nik Manning, who portrays Janet’s on-camera nemesis Violet Anne, had shot TV ads for McCormick Spices in her own kitchen, a perfect (if unplanned) audition. The two add diversity to the film’s mix; Draskovic is Indigenous, while Manning is Black.
Filming took place in a one-room set at Conduit Sound Studio in Minneapolis as well as Stately Lane Manor, the home of friends who decorated it in true 1970s fashion. The Western Minnesota Steam Threshers Reunion also shows up in several shots.
Setting the scenes and filming the actors was only the beginning of the production process, she notes. “Then it goes to the sound mixer, the film editor, the colorist … and you don’t see it for months,” she explains. “Nearly two years after the start, it was ready in the nick of time for the Fargo Film Festival.”
It couldn’t be part of that competition, however, because of her involvement in the organization. Janet is looking forward to competing in other festivals in the days to come. Given the film’s largely female cast and crew and its diverse talent, she’s particularly interested in contests seeking those qualities, along with others in which its Upper Midwestern flavor will appeal to audiences’ tastes.
Next? Brandau is currently setting up her website for “The Greater Cumberland County Cooking Show,” a necessity for festival submissions and reaching larger audiences. She also has signed contracts to design costumes or two films beginning production next month by Canticle Productions in Bismarck. One is based on the story on North Dakota’s schoolgirl martyr “Hazel Miner;” the other focuses on Medora deMores.
She’s already considering her next film, too – not one that tells a typical story, but an experimental production. After using the skills she has built in a lifetime of theatre and working with her late husband, she plans to focus on something that she knows far too well — the waves of emotion that wash over belongings left behind when a loved one passes away.