Winter Kept Us Warm
7.2 /10 1 Votes7.2
Budget 8,000 CAD Duration Language English | 7/10 IMDb Genre Drama, Romance Country Canada | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Release date 1965 Similar movies Sexual Chronicles of a French Family , Good Will Hunting , Independence Day , American Beauty , My Own Private Idaho , National Lampoon Presents Dorm Daze | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Winter kept us warm snow fight
Winter Kept Us Warm is a Canadian romantic drama film, released in 1965. The title comes from the fifth line of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land.
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An independent film written, directed, and funded by David Secter, it occupies a unique place in the history of Canadian cinema as the first English-language Canadian film ever screened at the Cannes Film Festival. Its debut was as the opening film of the Commonwealth Film Festival (Cardiff, September 27, 1965). It was also given a Special Jury Award at the 7th International Montreal Film Festival.
The film starred John Labow as Doug and Henry Tarvainen as Peter, two students at the University of Toronto who develop a complex quasi-romantic relationship, and Joy Tepperman and Janet Amos as their girlfriends Bev and Sandra. The film's gay subtext was carefully coded by Secter, who wrote the film based on his own experience falling in love with a male fellow student but feared that a more explicitly gay film would not attract an audience. Even some of the film's cast have claimed in interviews that they did not know at the time that the film was actually about homosexuality.
Winter kept us warm 1965
Legacy
Although not widely remembered among the general public, Winter Kept Us Warm is considered a major milestone in the Canadian film industry as one of the first Canadian films ever to attract international attention. Secter made a second film, The Offering, in 1966, one of the first Canadian films to depict an interracial romance. Secter subsequently moved to the United States. He directed the low budget sex comedy Getting Together, but subsequently left the film industry.
In the 1990s, Secter's nephew Joel rented Getting Together, not knowing that his uncle had directed films. Seeing David's name in the credits, Joel contacted his uncle to talk about his film career. Those discussions ultimately led to Joel Secter's own debut as a filmmaker, the 2005 documentary The Best of Secter & the Rest of Secter. Notable figures who discussed Secter and Winter Kept Us Warm in the documentary included David Cronenberg, Michael Ondaatje, Philip Glass, Ed Mirvish and Lloyd Kaufman.
The film was released on DVD by TLA Video in early 2011.
In 2015, the film was screened at Buddies in Bad Times during Toronto's Pride Week as the centrepiece of a selection of LGBT-themed Canadian films, to mark the launch of Thomas Waugh's Queer Media Database project.
References
Winter Kept Us Warm WikipediaWinter Kept Us Warm IMDb Winter Kept Us Warm themoviedb.org