New Restoration

“It’s hard for me to reproduce the effect that [Winter Kept Us Warm] had on me … I was stunned, shocked, exhilarated. It was an unbelievable experience [and] the beginning of my awareness of film as something that I could do.”

David Cronenberg

An underseen landmark in Canadian cinema, David Secter’s debut is a quietly confident drama of desire and its power to redraw the lines between people and their assumed identities. Peter (Henry Tarvainen) is the newest student to claim a dormitory at the University of Toronto’s Hart House, a gender-segregated campus centre where meals, hangouts, and downtime are ruled by students like Doug (John Labow), a senior econ major who knows how to keep up his aggressively masculine reputation for those who can’t see through his act. After Doug decides that Peter is worth opening up to, their social circles blur and an unspoken, possibly one-sided romance develops—one complicated by their respective girlfriends. A gay film director before Stonewall or The Body Politic, Secter met ​“some pockets of resistance” from U of T administration; it became the first English-language Canadian film to play Cannes, and an important influence on David Cronenberg.

“Henry Tarvainen plays the introvert—intense, honest, almost cross-eyed with sweetness and sensitivity; John Labow is the older boy, combining casualness and love in a very difficult part … [A] gentle, honest little film.”

Renata Adler, The New York Times

“[A] mix of edgy humour, tenderness that dare not admit it, and unconscious cruelty … We’ll accept it for what it is: a first sketch, but under the demanding gaze of a true artist.”

Louis Marcorelles, Cahiers du cinéma
Media