We're sorry, but our site requires Javascript to be enabled. If you would like instructions on how to enable Javascript, please click here.
How does it work?
VUCAVU works on a video-on-demand (VOD) basis. To rent a film or video, browse the catalogue, view details for individual films and videos, and click RENT when you find something to watch.
What is MY LIST?
You can create a customized list of films and videos to watch later. To add to your list, browse the catalogue and select the +MY LIST button.
Fanny meets her high school friends for the annual Switch & Bitch Party.
A young songwriter seeks out her folk idol in a sleepy lakeside village, only to become enmeshed in a secretive society whose rituals safeguard the threshold between worlds.
This is video compilation is part of the educational guide produced as part of Archive/Counter-Archive’s (A/CA) Case Study, Through Feminist Lenses: Video Works at Groupe Intervention Vidéo with Groupe Intervention Vidéo.
This playful, poignant & memorable short shadow play, where humans take from forests whatever they desire - leaving nothing. A collaborative film by a Canadian filmmaker and a Japanese visual artist.
A look at the community response to the murder of Nirmal Singh Gill, a caretaker at the Guru Nanak Gurudwara in Surrey BC by 5 white supremacist skinheads in 1998.
While narrating letters written to her ex, a woman attempts to cast away the lingering shadows of the relationship and overcome feelings of rejection and failure.
A shortened version of the synopsis that must be less than 500 characters in length. This teaser appears in a pop up when a user hovers their cursor on a title image in our search or other pages.
VHS video documentation of The images, such as they are, do have an effect on us: PORN Dossier. The envelope and folders are opened and the contents examined.
Chilean refugee Daniela (Carmen Aguirre) wants to travel back to Chile to learn more about her family as her father is reluctant to talk about his past. But she is about find out much more than she expected.
Spirit Bear's friends teach him about residential schools and how he can help with reconciliation!
Clash of cultures, care of the elderly and four women trying to make sense of their unravelling family, this is Mum Singh.
Filmed sporadically and intuitively during the summer months of 2020 and 2021, Homunculi is a recontextualization of a personal archive of hand processed 16mm “home movies” and various cinematographic experiments.
As he is making a didgeridoo, Bernard Bosa tells us what vibration is for him, what it has done in his life.
Two sisters attempt to find common understanding amidst bickering.
VHS video documentation of The images, such as they are, do have an effect on us: CENSORSHIP dossier. The envelope and folders are opened and the contents examined.
"C'est à qui, cette ville?" is a response to the 1984 film, “Ville, Quelle Ville?” This original super 8 film documented various places in Toronto’s east end and reflected upon a young woman’s life in the city.
Did you know that many First Nations schools get less money than provincial schools? Shannen Koostachin, a young leader from Attawapiskat First Nation, knew this was wrong, and so does Spirit Bear.
A female firefighter takes her daughter along for a day on the job.
A presentation for filmmakers and artists with VUCAVU.com’s Digital Programming Intern, Stephanie Poruchnyk-Butler.
The VUCAVU team is growing: we welcome Yvette Sin, in the position of Digital Education Programming Assistant at VUCAVU. Yvette Sin is an interdisciplinary artist, filmmaker, and bookseller based in Toronto. Her award-winning short films have screened internationally, including at the National Film Festival for Talented Youth and TIFF Next Wave...
We are thrilled to announce that Axelle Demus has been hired as VUCAVU’s Educational Sector Outreach Consultant. Axelle is a FOCAS (Faculty Organizing for Community Archives Support) postdoctoral fellow at McGill University’s School of Information Studies (archivalfocas.org)....
Jitterbugs is a short video about masks of comedy and tragedy, mounted on wind-up toys, as they dance to old-time jitterbug music and vie for the spotlight.
In this cautionary romance about life in the editing suite, the short monologue reminds us that, in the end, even the most advanced technology is usually handheld.
"Seasick" is a meditative exploration of one's love of the sea, to the soundtrack of traditional Croatian music.
Watch in awe as Miss Edmonton Teenburger 1983 graces the screen in her first featurette, IT'S PARTY TIME! A story as layered as her hair, as ethereal as her style. A pop explosion of Ukranian delight that will leave you bedazzled. Are you ready?
This film is available in French only. Use the "Search" or "Explore" site tools to select non-dialogue or English-language films and videos.
“This work is an interaction of the space, the symbols and the historical context in which I live as a woman on this side of the continent. It is a rosary of alarm, eternal and circular; the alarm of a woman who desires life, light, truth, and solidarity, but who instead sees and receives death and fear. It is a rejection of all that is destruction, and death, yet is depicted almost attractively as innocence.” - Gloria Camiruaga
Four seniors leave their retirement home and set off in search of a new life.
Falling Into Chaos is a world where the seminal space between beauty and glitch-chaos combine into a soothing balance.
“Retrato Oficial” animates the dissimulation and reconstruction of the great liberator of Chile, 19th-century revolutionary and republican Bernardo O’Higgins, and the historical reach of the late-20th-century dictator Augusto Pinochet.
A walk through the city of Maputo becomes a poetic visual essay. Inspired by two Mozambican poems, its central themes are: shoes, time, space, history, humanity, reading the asphalt and the intrusive effect of a camera. Scenes from everyday life and a series of portraits link with radio loops and local ambiance sound.
An excerpt from the feature length film "A GOOD MADNESS - The Dance of Rachel Browne" celebrating the life and work of choreographer and founder of Winnipeg's Contemporary Dancers, Rachel Browne.
Toujours la même histoire, fuis-moi je te suis, suis-moi je te fuis.
Is the word “Indian” a label for Canadian Aboriginals to reject or reclaim?
The Weaver's Circle is a short documentary film portrait of an environmental artist working in the downtown eastside of Vancouver.
A touching tribute to a life cut short too early.
The story of a man lost in the Arctic during a blizzard and his mysterious rescuer
A 70s TV sitcom set around a young group of artists.
Video collage, documenting a week spent in Chicago.
When Marc Roger, a public reader, sets himself the challenge of walking from Saint-Malo, France, to Bamako, Mali, along with a donkey laden with books to be read aloud, filmmaker Catherine Hébert (The Other Side of the Country) joins him in Morocco, her camera rolling."
This intricate stop-motion animation interlaces Canada’s colonial past with writer-director Amanda Strong’s personal family history — and illuminates Cree, Métis, and Anishinaabe reclamation of culture, language, and Nationhood. (Danis Goulet, TIFF)
A split-screen video of the Trans-Canada Highway and the single Access Road on our Reserve, the Lac des Mille Lacs First Nation / Nezaatiikang, located north-west of Thunder Bay. Before the completion of the Access road in the late 2000's, the Reserve was only accessible by water. The roads work as metaphor of Colonization by revealing disparity between Canada and Indigenous Nations.
A celebration of the strength, wisdom, beauty and humour of Native women; of Native culture and people, surviving and thriving.
A short video featuring composited imagery with themes of the transitory nature of moments in time, the ephemeral passing of everyday mundane experiences, and dealing with loss.
A spoken word poem and minimalist audio track about a sexy highland stream, a love letter to the beauty found in nature, and the mysterious way beauty is suffused in the natural world, written in English and Anishinaabemowin.
Numb, questions Kanata’s relationship with Indigenous peoples, allowing the viewer to contemplate the next 150 year relationship.
The bittersweet story of strongman and magician Mike Swistun who, for thirty days in 1923, was the strongman with Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus.
A place called home, a North End poem.
No two adoptees are alike. Harold & Peter, Lynne & Lynn, Maureen & Stephen and Dana candidly share their stories and reveal how being adopted shapes an individual’s identity right into adulthood.
Women talk about commercial and natural beauty.
Deux « sorcières » modernes, l'une de 25, l'autre de 50 ans, racontent leurs expériences de prise de pouvoir sur le corps et l’esprit.
Don’t Blink For 45 Seconds (After Kathy Dillon) is a 45 second performative video work addressing the thresholds and limitations of the body in relation to control.
"Beneath the Earth" marks the first in a series of works investigating the language of dreams and the cycles of life. Following the birth of her daughter, the artist addresses her fears and anxiety as a parent with a new found sense of mortality.
A resourceful young Métis man comes to the rescue of family, friends and strangers in this amusing short film.
"You're just a woman.... smile and relax."
An experimental short exploring the absences and buried histories that follow the act of leaving home, filtered through the many routes that leaving home takes for a "Canadien" daughter of Yugoslav immigrants: cultural displacement, assimilation, mother/daughter histories, sexuality and memory.
After Birth, an inter-generational journey to return to a ceremonial custom of burying the ‘after birth.’ Together three women and their kids walk the land and affirm their intergenerational knowledge and active presence in ancestral memories and matrilineal leadership.
Since the launch of the VUCAVU platform in 2016, we have collaborated with artists, educators, and arts organizations across the country to present a wide variety of independent Canadian films and video art online. Artists are always compensated for the dissemination of their works, and the artworks can often be rented individually for VOD viewing after the programming free period has expired. Programs are always accompanied by bilingual curatorial texts exploring the themes addressed in the selection, and many of them also include recordings of roundtable discussions and conversations with the artists!
We're delighted to launch A/CA's Educational Guide series; a project and research network dedicated to the activation and preservation of audiovisual archives created by Aboriginal peoples (First Nations, Métis, Inuit), Black communities and people of color, women, LGBT2Q+ and immigrant communities.