The organization's mission is to foster the appreciation of the art and legacy of cinema, and to advance critical thinking and thoughtful education about the impact of moving-images and screen-based media in society.

A core collection of several hundred significant British Columbian works dating from 1968 to 1978, the period of the first major wave of independent and avant-garde filmmaking in Vancouver, includes films by key West Coast film artists such as David Rimmer, Al Razutis, Byron Black, Ellie Epp, Phillip Borsoso, Sandy Wilson, Sturla Gunnarsson, Al Sens, Tom Braidwood, Peter Lipskis, and Kirk Tougas.

The Cinematheque was one of several Vancouver cultural organizations to emerge from the vibrant avant-garde and alternative arts scene that developed on Canada's West Coast in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

An important hub of this activity was Vancouver's Intermedia Society, a multidisciplinary collective, founded in 1967, of visual, performance, and media artists, including those interested in experimental, poetic, and "personal" cinema.

"[8] In a notorious incident of anti-institutional artistic vandalism, on March 28, 1986, during one of the Cine Centre's official opening-week events, the filmmaker Al Razutis, while participating in a panel on experimental film practice, defaced the front wall of Cinematheque's brand-new theatre by spray painting, below the movie screen, "Avant-garde spits in the face of institutional art.

"[9] This "direct action" performance was documented in the 1986 short film On the Problems of the Autonomy of Art in Bourgeois Society or... Splice, co-directed by Doug Chomyn, Scott Haynes, and Razutis.