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.

There is a peculiar correlation between so-called found footage filmmaking, founded on the reuse of pre-existing film footage, and the idea of "preserving" film heritage that drives the work of film museums and film archives. Unlike other forms of filmmaking which sprang to life "on their own" and were then preserved by film archives, found footage as a filmmaking tradition appeared only after film archives had gathered enough material to make artists curious about it.

A thrilling experimental evening at the cinema, featuring artistic research in practice at the Film Museum in cooperation with the Department of Experimental Design at the University for Art and Design Linz / Experimentalfilmlabor Siegfried A. Fruhauf.