Calgary Gay History

“Winter Kept Us Warm” comes from a line from T. S. Elliot’s poem The Wasteland, but it is also the title of a groundbreaking Canadian Film. 2025 is the 60th anniversary of the release of Winter Kept Us Warm by University of Toronto student David Secter. Cited as the first gay English-Canadian film, it received international acclaim, premiering in Cardiff, Wales, at the Commonwealth Film Festival in September 1965 (a first for a student-produced feature film). In 1966, the film was Canada’s first English language feature to be invited to the Cannes Film Festival.

Last year, a new 4K restoration of Winter Kept Us Warm was created, through Telefilm’s Reignited program, which funds the digital restoration of seminal Canadian films in collaboration with Canadian International Pictures, the avant-garde Blu-ray label resurrecting “vital, distinctive and overlooked triumphs of Canadian cinema.” Currently, the restored film is playing again in arthouse cinemas internationally. In addition, McGill University Press’s Queer Film Classics series recently launched a book by Chris Dupuis exploring the history of Secter’s movie and its cultural impact.

Winter Kept Us Warm was inspired by Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, which was made when the director was 24. Consequently, Secter ignored his fourth year of studies to focus on his own masterpiece. At 21, he put an ad in the student newspaper, The Varsity, asking, “Will the Great Canadian Film be produced at U of T?” and invited all interested students to join him in the venture.

With seed money from the Students’ Council of $750, he was able to shoot 12 minutes of the movie. After sorting through the footage, and with some impressed letters of support from more senior filmmakers, Secter hoped for financial support from the National Film Board (NFB), the Canada Council or the Ontario Arts Council.  However, they all gave it a pass. In the end, he was able to find the rest of the $8,000 budget himself through friends and his own personal donations.

(Ironically, it would be the NFB in May 1966, which would sponsor his showcase at  Cannes.)

The film’s gay subtext was deliberately staged by Secter, who wrote the film based on his own experience of falling in love with a male fellow student. He wrote that the film’s theme “is that friendship, like snow, is brilliant but ephemeral.” He had his volunteer crew on 24-hour notice for 5 weeks to capture the winter quadrangle romp scene he envisioned, waiting for the perfect weather conditions.

At a time when homosexuality was still criminalized in Canada, Winter Kept Us Warm proved to be pioneering; film critics in both the Toronto Star and Globe and Mail noted the film’s homosexual content.  Filmmaker David Cronenberg cites Winter Kept Us Warm as the most influential film in his life as well as to his discovery of cinema.

The film premiered in Canada at the Royal Ontario Museum in December 1965. It turned out to be a commercial success, playing in limited release across the country and on many University campuses. Secter was able to pay off his debts and attract $50,000 in seed money for his next film.

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