Made in 1987 by a collective of five Canadian filmmakers, A Winter Tan immediately sparked controversy. Jackie Burroughs initiated the project, wrote and co-directed it, and delivered an incendiary performance in the lead role. While some critics praised the film’s inventive risk-taking, others were unsettled by its sex-positive feminism, its treatment of sexual tourism, and Burroughs’s in-your-face performance. The perceived affront to respectability stifled A Winter Tan’s afterlife, leaving it largely forgotten.

In this deep dive into its creation, Catherine Russell shows how the film’s brazen challenge to conventions of femininity and propriety marked Canadian cultural history. A Winter Tan is adapted from the collected letters of Maryse Holder, who took a “vacation from feminism” to seek sex and sun with young men on Mexico’s beaches and in its nightclubs. Burroughs transformed Holder’s epistolary prose into performance art, reimagining its trenchant cultural critique through humour, burlesque, and unruly feminist activism. Drawing on interviews with cast and crew and including dozens of location photographs, the book reconstructs the production of this astonishing film while examining its experimental structure and dynamic aesthetics. A Winter Tan was Burroughs’s most ambitious role, and Russell puts it in the context of her persona and her varied career, which bridged counterculture, independent film, establishment theatre, and the heritage imaginary.

Russell reveals A Winter Tan to be a triumph of performance, transcultural film production, and collective creative practice, one that deserves to be understood as a central text of Canadian culture, avant-garde performance, and feminist cultural history.