In 1978 the well known Canadian structuralist filmmaker Joyce Wieland surprised the film community with her first feature, a romance set in the lush Canadian woodlands. The story, which takes place in 1919, follows the rebellion of a musician, Eulalie, who marries a status-seeking engineer but falls in love with a reclusive young painter, with tragic results. Some critics like Peter Harcourt in Take One noted that the film was a feminist fable in which narrative and social expectations were thwarted to reverse the subtext, common to romances, of viewing women through the eyes of men. Wieland notes that the characters were inspired by real people: “Eulalie is based on Marie Antoinette Levesque Snow, my mother-in-law for 26 years, who was born into a system that remained feudal until the early thirties.... (Her husband) is based in part on Bradley Snow (father of film artist Michael Snow)...and the artist is based on Tom Thomson, one of Canada's greatest artists...who died in 1919 under mysterious circumstances.... I made this film because I wanted to show something about a relationship between two artists, male and female. It is very unlikely that, in the puritanical Toronto society of 1919, their paths would have crossed.”