Written By: Kalil Haddad
Canada has a history of cinematic transgression. Properties that would later fuel the rise of video art and the adjacent radical scene, at one time bolstered a different kind of subversion. With his 1965 film Winter Kept Us Warm, director David Sector brought to screen one of the most nuanced, if not heavily closeted, depictions of homosexuality ever put to film. While less visibly radical than queer work to come, the film nevertheless remains political for its address of homosexuality; at the time defined as not only a mental illness, but illegal in Canada. Depicted so subtly, many in the cast failed to recognize they were in such a film, the piece went on to be the first Canadian feature to ever screen at Cannes; a tentpole for not only Canadian cinema, but queer cinema as well (Hays, 6). Following the lives of two male university students, the film played into the coded, obscure vernacular of “romantic friendships” (Brown, 83). Politically, a film no institute would have funded in the mid-sixties, the work serves as a benchmark for the power of accessible film technology. Funded by a then-twenty-two-year-old Sector, the film was independent in every sense of the word— empowering fellow creators over the coming decade, including a young David Cronenberg (Hays, 10). While little known today, the film is a testament to the inherently political power of personal technologies. Without the safeguard of the American studio systems or the National Film Board of Canada, the power of creation and self-expression was put into the hands of the people. Blossoming technologies—first film, then tape—created accessibility for smaller filmmakers, empowering smaller causes— the marginalized. Both feminist and queer filmmakers began creating work, using it as a tool to combat the oppression of the period.
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