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.

“You cannot apply the principles of painting to a medium that is not painting.” (Paul Sharits).

Film has laws of its own, but along with the other arts in the period around 1960 it searched for certain “zero points” that didn't revolve around nothing, but the whole. This three-part film programme, curated by Alexander Horwath and Regina Schlagnitweit, includes works from the period between 1958 and 2021 – by Stephanie Barber, Yves-André Delubac, Hollis Frampton, Jorge Lorenzo, Ernst Schmidt Jr., Aldo Tambellini, Joyce Wieland and many more. It also offers rare insight into Gregory Markopoulos’s cinematic life’s work ENIAIOS (1947–91), presented by the film artist Robert Beavers.

The special programme “Expanded Painlevé”, conceived with guest curator Federico Rossin, combines the films of Jean Painlevé, surrealist poet of wildlife, with those by filmmakers from the American and European avant-garde who have pursued different modes of openness to the animal world.

As part of the summer cycle Femmes femmes, a dedicated special program to the outstanding contribution of director Joyce Wieland to development of Canadian experimental cinema.