Winter People is a 1989 American romantic-drama film directed by Ted Kotcheff, and starring Kurt Russell and Kelly McGillis. It is based on the novel by John Ehle. Wayland Jackson, a widower with a young daughter, moves to a small, impoverished mountain village in North Carolina, circa 1934. They are taken in by Collie Wright, a single mother, and she and Wayland soon fall in love.

Plot

Young widowed clockmaker Wayland Jackson and his 12-year-old daughter, Paula, enter a small Depression-era community in the Appalachian Mountains literally by accident. Wayland becomes acquainted with Collie Wright (a single mother with a newborn child, Jonathan) who gives them shelter from the cold. As he becomes more familiar to the villagers, Wayland tries to persuade them that he could build a beautiful clock for the public square. His proposal is met with considerable skepticism, and then he is given the town's consent.