[Director David Cronenberg on the influence Winter Kept Us Warm (1965) had on his career:] "I can't say the 'University of Toronto' led me to horror, but what it did do was lead me to cinema, though I never studied cinema. There was a student called David Secter who was making a movie called Winter Kept Us Warm (1965), which starred some friends of mine. And it never occurred to me that you could make a movie. It was unlike someone growing up in LA where everybody's parents were in the business. In Toronto, no one's parents were in the movie business because there wasn't a movie business.(...) The number of films I've seen that have impressed me is endless. But actually, Winter Kept Us Warm (1965) is the most influential film of my life in a weird way. It wasn't a horror film - it was a drama about students coping with life at the 'University of Toronto' - and it wasn't because of its artistry. It was just the fact it was made. It's hard to reproduce the shock I felt when I saw my classmates on screen in a real movie, acting. It was like magic: you are watching TV and suddenly you are in the TV, acting in some TV series. It was that kind of shock." ('The Guardian' 14th Sept. 2014)
In 1966 Winter Kept Us Warm (1965) became Canada's first English-language film to be presented at the Cannes Film Festival. It was part of the 'Parallel Section' ('Festival de Cannes - Sélection officielle 1966 - Section parallèle').
The Title is a Line from T.S. Eliot's Epic Poem "The Waste Land". "Winter kept us warm,/covering Earth in forgetful snow,/ feeding a little life with dried tubers."