FilmExchange Review: The Best of Secter & The Rest of Secter

Posted by: Timo Puolitaipale  •  March 3, 2005 @ 11:59am

Filed under: Reviews

In 1965, at the age of 22, English literature major David Secter wrote and directed a drama set on the University of Toronto campus about the friendship between two male students. Winter Kept Us Warm became the first English-language Canadian film to play at the Cannes Film Festival. What became of David Secter?

In The Best of Secter & The Rest of Secter, Joel Secter, filmmaker and nephew of David Secter, charts the career of this "man who lived what he filmed and filmed what he lived" from the success with Winter Kept Us Warm to the off-the-map, low-budget Cyberdorm and finally to the offices of Robert Shaye, founder of New Line Cinema.

The documentarian interviews friends and contemporaries including David Cronenberg, Michael Ondaatje and Philip Glass, instantly adding an air of legitimacy to a name and face as foreign to most Canadians as the man's movies. But it is the stories of David Secter himself that allow us to discover most about Winter Kept Us Warm and what became of him after its success. This documentary is for him as much a chance to look back as it is for us the audience to see him exposed.

The documentary offers an especially intriguing few moments as the younger Secter captures the thoughts and reactions of some of the cast and crew of Winter Kept Us Warm when the homoeroticism in the film is discussed. Time and distance from the production and the time it was made in has changed many of their perspectives. The homoeroticism that was then not even considered is now so blatantly obvious. Times have changed as much as David Secter.

It could be argued that the story of David Secter the filmmaker peaked in 1965 and his work is now only a dull needle in a haystack, not worth the trouble of digging for it. It could also be opined that this Secter on Secter documentary is a practice in nepotism, but that in itself is the reality of the film industry anywhere. At the end of it all, the only question I am left to ask myself is if I am glad to have been introduced to David Secter, and that I am. You will be too.

Show Me is playing Thursday, March 3rd at 9:45pm at Globe Cinema as part of the 2005 NSI FilmExchange Festival in Winnipeg.