Winter Kept Us Warm (1965) watch online

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.

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