Joyce Wieland (1931–1998) became a pioneer of Canadian experimental film by creating a body of work that perfectly expressed her unconventional and radically personal approach as an artist. When she started off as a painter in the 1950s, she earned her living at an advertising and commercial film studio in Toronto where she became familiar with the medium as would later be mirrored in her own films: like her long-time husband Michael Snow, she studied cinematic perception by focusing on objects from a familiar and inanimate world.

This film program brings together two very prominent people within the American and Canadian alternative art and film communities. Eminent film critic, underground actress and performance artist Amy Taubin made a few forays into the world of filmmaking, and her most well known work is In the Bag, from 1981. In the words of film scholar and theorist Noël Carroll: «Roughly twenty minutes long, the film records a search through a tattered, patchwork-quilt shoulder bag for something – we know not what.