Janet Brandau (right) and Nik Manning play competing cooks in “The Greater Cumberland County Cooking Show.” (Photo/Brandau.)

Nancy Edmonds Hanson

Before network blockbusters reached far into the North Country, 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.
That’s the premise of Moorhead filmmaker Janet Brandau’s first solo project, “The Greater Cumberland County Cooking Show.” Set in a small and distant fictional community, the 25-minute short film depicts the rivalry between two would-be local kitchen wizards – the elder, concocting unlikely local-foods originals like Apple, Spinach and Onion Tart and Mutton Rutabaga Hotdish; and the younger, preparing barbecued ribs and other dishes that viewers are considerably likelier to actually eat.
Their rivalry rivalry 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 warfare.
“I’ve been thinking for a long time about the interconnections between food, friendship and community,” Brandau reflects. “The people we love most are sometimes the same ones who drive us crazy.”
She 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 was 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 nearing the end of her initial tour of eight Minnesota cities. She’s bringing it home to Moorhead at 2 p.m. Saturday, April 20, at the Moorhead Public Library. It will be followed by a conversation about how food connects communities. It should come as no surprise that refreshments, naturally, will be served.
Set 50 years ago in small-town Minnesota, the comedy premiered at the Fargo Film Festival, on whose board Brandau has served for 25 years. She has delighted in audiences’ smiles and laughter ever since as they catch the regional references that pepper its sets and react to the competing cooks wise cracks.
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, heading up 16 shows along the way. “I did everything, from costuming and props to directing,” she reports. She wrote two of them herself.
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, who 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 she was living at the time. After marrying the next year, she became his leading collaborator in the series of short films they produced during every summer break … until 2021, when he died of cancer.
Both Brandaus retired in 2020 just before COVID turned the campus upside down. At the time, Janet too was ill: “Tom’s cancer was incurable. Mine ultimately fell in the curable column.”
“Cumberland County” marks her stepping out on her own. As she put it together, though, 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 also edited the film), director of photography Christian Calabrese (also the colorist and drone operator) and gaffer Bill Straub. She and daughter Kate wrote and performed the music that bridges time and space between the film’s three scenes; it was recorded at David Hansen’s sound studio on Pelican Lake.
She tracked down the other two 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 plays TV cook Violet Anne, had shot TV ads for McCormick Spices in her own kitchen. They bring a diverse character to the TV show; 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.”
After finishing her current octet of showings that’s taken her from Duluth to Thief River Falls and Paynesville to Brainerd and Moorhead, she plans to enter it in film festivals across the country. With its largely female cast and crew and the diversity among its actors, she’s particularly interested in contests seeking those entries, along with others where its Upper Midwestern flavor will appeal to audiences’ tastes.
Next? Brandau is setting up the website for “The Greater Cumberland County Cooking Show,” a necessity for submitting it to festivals. She also has signed contracts to design costumes for 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.