A Man Whose Life Was Full of Woe Has Been Surprised By Joy is about transformations—about transformations of imagery through collage and montage, about history as transformation, about eros as a transformative power, and, most of all, about the transformations of the self. It rejects modernity's inhumane technological order and seeks to reconnect the body and the self.

Canadian artist-filmmaker Richard Kerr was raised in a north-south family near the American border. From a young age he was preoccupied with the vision of empire reflected in American mass culture and sport. As he matured as a filmmaker, Kerr began to turn his attention increasingly to America as a subject, undertaking road trips through the American southwest, studying the spirit of a landscape made for cinema.