A poetic and lyrical portrait of a young couple spending a Montreal winter together.

With summer upon us, it’s good to see the winter we left behind. We Refuse To Be Cold is a short film by Alexander Carson produced by North Country Cinema with the support of the National Film Board of Canada.

The wonderful thing about this short is how this ‘love’ story was brought to us from a completely different angle. To begin with, the film was impressively shot without a script, and the whole thing was process-based, filmed over an entire winter on a variety of formats, including HDCAM, 16mm, and Video 8.

We knew that it would be a story about a couple making a naive promise, but we didn’t have a very definite plan at the outset. The collaborative spirit that defined this project led us to produce a film that is equal parts fiction, experimental, and documentary.

-Alexander Carson

Even without a script, the story meshes wonderfully together with the strong and original premise of working the film around a promise in a style that we our not used to seeing, but brings such a fresh cold breeze to us while watching.

North Country Cinema

National Film Board of Canada