Winter Kept Us Warm
Directed by David Secter
Canadian Filmmakers
Distribution Centre
IN 1965, a 22-year-old undergraduate student at the University of Toronto set out to make his first feature-length film. The result was David Secter’s Winter Kept Us Warm, a story about two young dorm-mates who fall in love—innocent, occasionally awkward, but groundbreaking as a love story between two men, and an autobiographical one at that. Winter Kept Us Warm (the title is taken from T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”) matter-of-factly recounts the relationship that unfolds between two undergraduates as they struggle to balance their studies with their emerging social lives.
When applying for permission to shoot the film at the University of Toronto campus, Secter was forced to camouflage his subject matter—but the themes in the film won’t be lost on contemporary audiences accustomed to more explicit offerings. One scene even has the two men in the shower together, allowing one to playfully lather up the other’s back with soap. While the sexual element of their relationship could only be hinted at, given attitudes of the time, upon its release Variety, the movie industry’s bible, referred to it as a film about homosexuality.
A deeply melancholic feeling sets in as you watch Winter Kept Us Warm. Without the digitally-enhanced technology that saturates most of contemporary cinema, the film achieves a beauty in its sheer simplicity—one that makes us long for the era in which such films were made. At the same time, it’s a bit dismaying to consider how far we still have to go in the cinematic representation department. The fact that Winter Kept Us Warm features two men, neither of them a serial killer nor a suicide by final credit roll, is in itself surprising. Forty years after this film was created, we’re forced to ask whether Hollywood even today would produce a romantic campus film featuring two gay characters in the lead. Winter’s plot is set in motion when a shy, repressed young man arrives on campus and is soon taken under the wing of a brash, outgoing party animal—the latter based on the writer-director himself. Despite its limited budget, the film proved intriguing enough to become the first English-language Canadian film to be invited to Cannes, where Secter found himself rubbing elbows with such iconic directors as Renoir, Welles, and Bresson. He still recalls dining with Sophia Loren, head of the 1966 festival’s jury. Secter has continued to make films over the years, including 1967’s The Offering, which depicted the first interracial heterosexual relationship in Canadian cinema, as well as 1999’s Cyberdorm, an offbeat campus comedy. Now 62 and living in Long Beach, California, he is again touring the festival circuit with a documentary, Take the Flame! Gay Games: Grace, Grit & Glory, about the history of the gay games and homophobic discrimination in sports. His nephew Joel Secter has made a personal documentary about his uncle David’s unique place in cinematic history, The Best of Secter & The Rest of Secter, which is also making the film festival rounds. Although Winter Kept Us Warm has popped up on the gay and lesbian film festival circuit from time to time, it remains difficult to find. (Secter credits gay film scholar Thomas Waugh, who has championed the film, with helping to keep it on the cultural radar screen.) But Secter has been buoyed by the fact that Winter is now being released on DVD. Unfortunately, it’s a version created for sale to educational institutions, so it has a hefty price tag ($175) that puts it out of reach for the average collector. But Secter hopes the new attention given to the film may lead to the creation and release of a more affordable DVD. In the meantime, film scholars and academics everywhere should insist their universities and colleges order a copy of this crucial bit of gay film history for their libraries. The very existence of Winter Kept Us Warm is quite astonishing; that its romance has stood the test of time so beautifully is an added bonus. Winter Kept Us Warm is now available to educational institutions through the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre (www.cfmdc.org).
