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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.
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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.
VUCAVU.education is a streaming platform that gives educators and students access to a curated selection of independent Canadian film and video art spanning more than 50 years. The shared catalogue includes documentary, fiction, experimental, and animation titles from artists across Canada, offering many unique views into the country’s cultural landscape.
VUCAVU.education is an initiative of the VUCAVU.com platform.
The VUCAVU team, in consultation with our content partners, have made the decision to slowly shut down our view-on-demand (VOD) services on our platform to make way for a new direction in our operations. VOD changes will occur on VUCAVU over the coming months. As we make changes to the platform with our developers, we will periodically update this page and share news in our regular communications.
Fanny meets her high school friends for the annual Switch & Bitch Party.
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.
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.
Follow along with Spirit Bear as he realizes the importance of learning history to make better decisions now and for future generations of kids and cubs.
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.
Spirit Bear's friends teach him about residential schools and how he can help with reconciliation!
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.
A female firefighter takes her daughter along for a day on the job.
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.
Two sisters attempt to find common understanding amidst bickering.
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 young loner struggles to make connection at a haunted summer camp.
As he is making a didgeridoo, Bernard Bosa tells us what vibration is for him, what it has done in his life.
Clash of cultures, care of the elderly and four women trying to make sense of their unravelling family, this is Mum Singh.
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.
Digital 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.
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.
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.
Venus is born again in the Canadian wilderness, as muse, artist, and catfish
Water bodies grow restless as they awaken from winter’s deep freeze.
Cuthand uses a latent gas mask fetish as a jumping off point for looking at their role as a participant in the Whitney Biennial during a contentious year for the museum which had a war profiteer on the board.
The past is a funny place.
This video makes use of animations of photographs and superimpositions of images. Bodies moving in space reproduce the drawings of Antonin Artaud.
An animated documentary web-series about the successes, failures, and incredible confusion trying to date as a genderqueer/trans person.
Languages define their worlds and memories.
"The Magus" is a multi-format, process-based experimental film that explores the root of artistic creation.
Invisible spiritual and psychological issues permeate every aspect of life, and yet remain hidden in average experience. The transformation from suffering to joy is one such process, and is explored in this three-part piece that pays homage to the video art of the 1980s and 1990s.
Numb, questions Kanata’s relationship with Indigenous peoples, allowing the viewer to contemplate the next 150 year relationship.
Picariello and Lassandro investigates the real-life story of Filumena “Florence” Lassandro and Emilio Picariello, Italian immigrants who were convicted and hanged in 1923 for the murder of an Alberta Provincial Police officer.
A masked crochetist shows us his sudden immersion into crochet art.
In Danny Kaye’s Eyes the viewer becomes a world traveler on a simulated odyssey through a rich, subtle and slightly foreboding web of references.
A child's imagination is a dangerous thing.
Longboy outs himself as a First Nations FAG - who is living with HIV - hoping to sever attached preconception of two spirited peoples. In a contemplative search, the artist recollects how HIV/AIDS has affected him and his surrounding community, revealing a strength through loss.
A posthumous coming out film diary to my mom. Shot October 11, 1988, Bethel Memorial Park, Detroit.
Porn star, Ryan Russell is rotoscoped in this performance about ego and Eros. In the tradition of the peepshow a private sexual performance is made public. A lone figure enters the frame, smirks at the camera and gets down to business. Is he simply there to entertain himself or is this a performance for the viewer? It eventually goes terribly wrong when he quite literally drowns in his own ego.
Eduardo, a snob publicist who lives cranky most of the day and David, a shy student of literature are neighbors in a building under construction. After 6 months hardly greet a scaffold intercede between them causing unexpected reactions in each. Spanish with English subtitles.
Un plan unique sur un dos dénudé offre une résistance à notre désir de voir. Une voix de femme raconte. Elle parle de son dos, du corps qui n'est pas transparent, de la douleur...
This 25-minute documentary offers a look into the lives of four people, born female, who believe they are neither men nor women. They tell their stories about “coming out”, the challenges of being trans in everyday life and their thoughts on a world divided into two genders
Eddie is a hormonal 14-year-old boy living alone with his mother in the suburbs. One day after school, he accidentally spies on his attractive older neighbor, Chad, as he steps out of the shower and measures himself with a red comb. Not long afterward, Eddie is the victim of a verbal slur by Chad's friend Tim. This inspires Eddie to enact some creative retaliation. Winner of the Audience Award at the MiMi LGBT Short Film Festival 2012.
"Gabey and Mike: A Jewish Summer Camp Love Story" takes its name from a song by Mermaid Café - a folk band comprised of Andi D., Joe A. Rider and Merrill Nisker (now known as ‘Peaches’) that gained popularity at Canadian Jewish summer camps in the early 90s. The video juxtaposes the tale of the band with playful re-creations of the story of Gabey and Mike, in a queer re-staging of the classic summer camp movie.
Poet RM Vaughan muses on his relationship to 50s film noir tough guy hunk Sterling Hayden, and why he cannot make his life more like a 50s film noir masterpiece. Created by video/internet artist Jared Mitchell, the film inserts Vaughan into the rain-dappled, shadowed and dreamy world of film noir - turning the poet into Hayden’s moll, lover, and dumb broad.
Amidst a biodiverse wasteland on the brink of being enveloped by encroaching bitumen, the enigmatic Beast of the Earth materializes in a prophetic dance.
There are many memories of childhood that have slipped through the cracks. Most that I can recollect were of the differences in myself in comparison to the others around. Taken away at one week of age from my Indian community and given to a white foster family, my experience of the authentic Indian and where my placement is, within this dream of authenticity, comes from an infected locale.
High Altitude explores what it means to be an Indigenous artist in the modern world.
Whitewash examines slavery in Canada and its omission from the national narrative. The country prides itself as being the benevolent refuge where enslaved Africans who were brought to United States gained their freedom via the Underground Railroad. That powerful image overshadows the fact that slavery was legal in Canada for over 200 years under both French and British rule.
Grand Chief Sheila North investigates unsolved murder of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls.
A home movie of Cree woman hunting is saved from being lost forever, but how does it compare to official Canadian history of northern Manitoba?
Gaawiin Gego [Got No Nothing] is based on a rhyme in Ojibwe that my great aunt taught me, the lyrics reference the blues and a Nina Simone song. The audio track is layered over top of found video footage from Lac Des Mille Lacs, which is the lake beside our Reserve
still is part of an ongoing body of work that addresses the persistence of colonial structures in contemporary Canada through a critical white settler lens. These works confront facets of this overarching concern through a practice of performing interventions into the land/scape and tampering with iconic elements of Canadian visual culture. Integrating the residue of an off-camera performance within a quintessentially ‘Canadian’ landscape as a politically, culturally and historically mitigated r
Hoop Dancers is a silent video featuring four young men in powwow regalia playing pick-up basketball.
This work deals with the idea of sacred and profane and the Catholicism as an instrument of colonization.
Exploring the legacy of the Indian Residential School system by looking at its history, present conditions and hopes for the future.
WÎSKACÂN is an experimental contemporary dance film utilizing Bunraku-style tabletop puppetry and object performance. Video, Puppet Design, Performance, and Music by Tyson Houseman. This project was made as part of Canada Council for the Arts Digital Originals initiative, and I acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.
Since the launch of the VUCAVU platform, we've collaborated with hundreds of artists, arts organizations and educators from across Canada to present bilingual curated and educational programming online. Artists always receive royalties and screening fees from these programs and they often include additional educational resources such as recordings of roundtable discussions and artist talks. After the paid or free programming period expires, available artworks can be rented individually.
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.
Discover our new VUCAVU.education postcards designed by Emil Woudenberg from Strike Design Studio, featuring a still from Caroline Blais’ film “Étoiles” (available for VOD on VUCAVU!). We’re pleased to pay Caroline for using their image and are dedicated to building VUCAVU in community with artists.