Inside the digital resurrection of Winter Kept Us Warm, the seminal Canadian film that history forgot

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Every step in the slow but sturdy evolution of Canada’s film industry has its own “butterfly effect” moment – an instance in which one seemingly innocuous event ripples throughout history in unexpected ways.

In 1965, one such pivotal point was when a young University of Toronto student named David Cronenberg caught a screening of Winter Kept Us Warm, an ultralow-budget drama filmed by fellow student David Secter, and featuring a number of Cronenberg’s friends and classmates.

“It never occurred to me that you could make a movie. It was unlike someone growing up in L.A., where everybody’s parents were in the business. In Toronto, no one’s parents were in the movie business because there wasn’t a movie business,” Cronenberg recalled in an interview several years ago, explaining how Secter’s film inspired him to pick up a camera – and thus eventually transform this country’s arts scene.

Yet for all of Winter Kept Us Warm’s milestones – not only inspiring Cronenberg, but also becoming the first Canadian English-language film to be accepted at the Cannes Film Festival – the movie has fallen into the deepest margins of history. It is not available on physical media, on streaming or at the library. And it is rarely discussed in even the most academic of circles. It is almost as if Winter Kept Us Warm doesn’t exist.

But that will all change this month, when Secter’s film will be celebrated on several fronts.

Next week, the Inside Out Film Festival in Toronto will premiere a new 4K restoration of Winter Kept Us Warm. The screening is a collaboration between the queer-focused arts organization; Telefilm’s Reignited program, which funds the digital restoration of seminal Canadian films; and Canadian International Pictures, the upstart boutique Blu-ray label dedicated to resurrecting “vital, distinctive and overlooked triumphs of Canadian cinema.” (CIP will release the film on Blu-ray next year.) At the same time, McGill University Press’s Queer Film Classics series is launching a book by Chris Dupuis exploring the complicated history of Secter’s movie and its cultural impact.

“There was so little film activity at the time in Canada – you could count the number of Canadian films on one hand,” Secter says today. “I saw Don Owen’s Nobody Waved Goodbye, which made me think that this was something I could maybe do. It all happened very quickly, so I tried my best to learn how to do it.”

Shot on a budget of just $8,000, Secter pulled off a guerrilla-style production – no permits, little rehearsal – to tell the story of two U of T students, the outgoing Doug (John Labow) and the reserved Peter (Henry Tarvainen), whose friendship develops into something more over the course of a school year. How much more, though, was a tricky thing to convey at the time.

As Dupuis notes, Winter Kept Us Warm was made at the same time that Canadian George Everett Klippert was sentenced to prison for the crime of, essentially, being gay. The atmosphere around queer life was so hostile that Secter didn’t even tell much of his cast what his thematic intentions were.

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“We never used the term ‘gay’ or ‘queer’ – I always described it as a surprising relationship between two guys from different backgrounds,” Secter says. “John Labow claims that he never thought the character was gay. It wasn’t homophobic on his part, but I think he was full of it. The material is subtle enough so it’s there if you’re looking for it, but otherwise it could be interpreted and enjoyed without that element, which is a route a lot of the cast chose.”

Dupuis believes that Winter Kept Us Warm’s ultimate legacy rests not with its impact on queer culture, but on Canadian – specifically, Toronto – cinema.

“At that point in time, there was a burgeoning indie-cinema movement happening in Quebec, but it didn’t exist elsewhere in Canada. And if something doesn’t exist, people don’t think that they can do it,” the author says. “So David being inspired by Owen’s Nobody Waved Goodbye, and then Cronenberg being inspired by Winter Kept Us Warm, the influence is narrow but important.”

And yet the film was inaccessible in all but the crudest forms until CIP and Telefilm stepped in.

“It had a reputation as a key film that was essential to the development of Canadian cinema, but you could only watch it as a bad rip on YouTube,” says Jonathan Doyle, co-founder of CIP. “We feel good when we work on a film where there’s huge room for improvement, where we can make a significant impact restoring it.”

As for Secter – who left Toronto for New York’s underground arts scene shortly after making his second feature and now lives in Hawaii – the filmmaker still retains fond memories of not only the hectic production, but of his big moment at Cannes in 1966.

“Sophia Loren was at our table, and made a point of talking to everyone there,” he recalls, “so I can today say that I literally broke bread with her.”

Winter Kept Us Warm screens at the Inside Out Film Festival in Toronto on May 27 (insideout.ca).

Inside Out: Highlights

The 34th edition of Toronto’s Inside Out offers a wealth of notable screenings, including: Sisters, a family drama from Canadian director Susie Yankou, recipient of the 2022 festival’s Re:Focus Fund supporting women, non-binary and/or trans filmmakers; Nicholas Giuricich’s romantic drama Spark, which is being billed as “Groundhog Day meets Vertigo”; the documentary Unusually Normal by Colette Johnson-Vosberg, which follows three generations of women in “Canada’s gayest family”; and the Canadian premiere of Karen Knox’s romcom We Forgot to Break Up, about a small-town indie rock band led by a trans singer (Lane Webber) who seek stardom in Toronto. Inside Out runs May 24 through June 1 in-person and online. B.H.