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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.
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.
A female firefighter takes her daughter along for a day on the job.
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.
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.
As he is making a didgeridoo, Bernard Bosa tells us what vibration is for him, what it has done in his life.
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.
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.
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.
A presentation for filmmakers and artists with VUCAVU.com’s Digital Programming Intern, Stephanie Poruchnyk-Butler.
Spirit Bear's friends teach him about residential schools and how he can help with reconciliation!
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.
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.
"Stillness of remote places where I tend to feel the most focused." K.T.
A fun and imaginative stop-motion animation that examines the allure and consequences of stationery supplies.
A woman creates a runway to fly up into the "clear blue" above an endless landscape.
St. John the Baptist, Performance/ Installation with video- 4 monitors and video projection "One may not be capable of loving, except for loving someone who loves." –Baudrillard.
Artist Portrait of 2015 Governor General Award recipient, Reva Stone.
He’s a priest, he doesn’t say Mass and yet, every Sunday he assembles the same group of people at St. Gemma’s Church.
The Weaver's Circle is a short documentary film portrait of an environmental artist working in the downtown eastside of Vancouver.
The camera mounted on a dolly moves through Mater, an installation of mother and child figures by Elvira Finnigan.
A meditation on (im)mortality, mediated by a lifetime of images
In this film, Renate Gravert-Martins’s photography and life is told through her work and 16mm reinterpretations of her images.
"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.
Port Lands presents Toronto’s industrial waterfront as a complex landscape in which past, present, and future geographies transition and converge.
An incident at the fridge. Some floozy, a gal in waiting, a gal in a camisole, a guy in a dress, a gal in a kilt, and a gal in charge.
This work is a fantasy of freedom, in which a stroll in the park gives rise to an opening up of unstable sexual codes, shifting identities and the empowering game of come and go.
A five-foot, six-inch rappin’ vulva, in an unexpected parody of the music video genre, leads the viewer on a complete description of female genitalia.
Animated magazine cutouts of two men having sex lead into appropriated gay porn images, blurred to the point where they become abstract colour and motion.
Using the voice as a metaphor for political voice, Stephen Chen traces his journey as a male mezzo, faced with prejudice and marginalization back in Singapore, and later in North America.
A woman, a transgender man, and their cat travel towards a mysterious roadside attraction known as "The Thing.”
“Borders” is an intimate exploration of the bodies belonging to six queer individuals. This animation, made up of hundreds of high-resolution photographs, unabashedly examines the evidence of physical change and transformation: top surgery scars, tattoos, and other traces. The bodies are fragmented, as are the stories affiliated with these traces, and identities remain delightfully elusive. “Borders” is available as a single-channel work or as an extended installation.
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.
Riverside Queerness reveals hard moments in the Prairies' shadowed queer history. Three storytellers navigate muddy waters that is Manitoba's subconsciousness; where truth is blurred by the power of the currents.
A further examination of self-commodification in the form of a bizarre info-mercial. "What if we invented someone... at a time when resistance and change were becoming paradoxicallyincorpor-related?...
Spiritual sanctuary, sex, sisterhood and a gathering of faeries.
Madeleine, caught between a painful past and an uncertain future, must come to terms with the loss of her lover, Claire. Making her way through Paris, Madeleine follows Aubrie, a beautiful and elusive woman who happens to work at the café below Madeleine's apartment. - Inside Out LGBT Film & Video Festival
The artist ponders the possibilities of reconciliation.
A place called home, a North End poem.
This video interrogates how subjectivities, political stances, and modes of social engagement formed elsewhere contribute to our positioning within the local, cultural landscape of Vancouver.
Treaty X features an audio track and a layering of composited video footage with themes of connection/disconnection to land and waters, treaty rights, and the way capitalism monetizes nature. The Treaty #3 territory comprises 55,000 hectares of land, and annuity payments of $5 have never been adjusted for inflation.
High Altitude explores what it means to be an Indigenous artist in the modern world.
A deeply intimate look at the frightening realities of food insecurity in First Nations communities.
Is the word “Indian” a label for Canadian Aboriginals to reject or reclaim?
An Ojibwe boy falls in love with Grandfather Sun, and recites an Anishinaabe language morning prayer with a few slight alterations. Thank you Grandfather. Miigwetch Nshoomis. I love the feel of your light on my skin. Gotta love that Vitamin D. The language used in this piece is Anishinaabe/Ojibwe.
September 2013. The Court ruling is reached. Almost a quarter million Dominicans of Haitian descent have just become stateless because of the Dominican Constitutional Tribunal’s decision.
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.
One Story was originally produced as part of the Community Play “Travois” in 1994. It is a look into the various complicated and overlapping stories that inform the current urban and traditional culture of the First Nations peoples. The questionable politics that dictate Status and the paternalism of Treaty Days are juxtaposed with the pow wow, the voice of graffiti and the street.
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.
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.