Underplayed Gems

Winter Kept Us Warm (1965)

Winter Kept Us Warm poster
Directed by
David Secter
Genre
drama film, LGBTQ-related film
Country
Canada
Runtime
1h 21m
Rated
15
Rating
5.7 of 10 from 11 voters
Elsewhere
IMDb
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How it feels

Two university students in Toronto develop a close friendship that hints at deeper romantic feelings. The film follows their emotional connection and the social pressures of the 1960s.

tenderunderstatedelegiacintimatemelancholicnostalgicslow-burnyearning

What happens

Winter Kept Us Warm is a 1965 Canadian romantic drama film written and directed by David Secter. It stars John Labow, Henry Tarvainen, Joy Tepperman, and Janet Amos. It was the first English-language Canadian film shown at the Cannes Film Festival. Secter, a student at the University of Toronto, made a short film and was a film critic in The Varsity before making his feature film debut with Winter Kept Us Warm. The title of the film comes from a line in T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. The film was produced on a limited budget of $8,000 and the entire cast worked for free. Although the film is considered English Canada's first queer film, the cast of the film was not made aware of the film's subject matter during casting. Guerrilla filmmaking tactics were used to film around Toronto and a completed script was never made for the film due to the limited amount of time available. Before the film was completed the Commonwealth Film Festival in Cardiff, United Kingdom, requested that the film be submitted. Seven minutes of footage was sent and the film was approved. Winter Kept Us Warm premiered as the opening film of the Commonwealth Film Festival. It earned back its production costs and the National Film Board of Canada submitted it to the 1966 Cannes Film Festival's Critics' Week. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

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