Winter Kept Us Warm

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. 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.