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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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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
A young loner struggles to make connection at a haunted summer camp.
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.
Two sisters attempt to find common understanding amidst bickering.
Amidst a biodiverse wasteland on the brink of being enveloped by encroaching bitumen, the enigmatic Beast of the Earth materializes in a prophetic dance.
A female firefighter takes her daughter along for a day on the job.
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.
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.
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.
This animation uses watercolor paintings of child-morphed creatures, poppies and dismembered legs, based on collaged photos from my animation ‘Nothing ever happened’, to produce a commentary on loss.
YNMD is a found footage film made using archival 16mm prints spliced together on a Steenbeck flatbed editor. Inspired by the DADA poems of Hugo Ball.
ZAGROS follows the creation of carpets across the Western mountains of Iran, revealing the colours of a culture through labour.
A meditation experience to unlock and reconcile with one's past in an effort to imagine a future actualized self.
The surveillance video depicts the omnipresence of internalized social norms restricting the lives of many women living under the gaze of the rigid traditions.
Stay Away is a video poem about the feeling of being apart.
Successions of tableaux that offer a metaphoric look at nuptial images.
In the late 1950s, a woman named Agnes approached the UCLA Medical Center seeking sex reassignment surgery. Her story was long considered to be exceptional and singular until never-before-seen case files of other patients were found in 2017. Watch as preeminent trans culture-makers of our time breathe new life into those who redefined gender in the midcentury.
A diva is tied to a wooden 'lectric chair.
"I watched a movie one afternoon and this is the story of that movie." A fictional story is combined with my personal archives of photos.
you rub me the wrong way was created as part of SOUND + VISION TORONTO produced by Basement Arts. This project paired 5 local filmmakers with 5 local bands/musicians and 1 local neighborhood. I was asked to interpret and adapt a song by the potent forces behind post-punk band Pants & Tie in Toronto’s dynamic Kensington Market.
A fantastic journey of colour using 6490 photographs of spin art micro paintings.
The Long Form Lesbian Census polls the Toronto lesbian community to find out important statistics.
Bill Pusztai is a photographer who does portraiture and plants.
The title of COCONUT/CANE & CUTLASS represents the psyche behind the collective memory, history and imagination of Indo-Caribbean people. The film is a mythic/poetic rumination on exile, displacement, and nationhood from the perspective of an Indo-Caribbean lesbian who migrated to Canada twenty years ago.
One of his first videos, Gonick”s Exit/Portal explores subcultural ritual and violence in a short video that references the work of fellow “Queerpunk” artists Pier Paulo Pasolini and Derek Jarman.
What would a feminist superhero look like? Could she leap tall buildings in a single bound? Could she bend steel with her bare hands? What would her name be? And would anyone remember it? Commissioned by MAWA's Art Building Community Symposium, performance artists Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan have created an aging superhero with unusual powers. Watch as she wrestles the notion of "super" to the ground! In light of reality TV and celebrity culture, where everyone who wants to be a superstar ca
Métis Femme Bodies returns the narratives to those who have had their voices muted and cultures stolen from them.
The Traveller is driving at night. Unbeknownst to her, she is about to reach a town where only Big Girls dwell! Who will prevail?
Over 2500 hand drawn frames create a rotoscope animation of a figure that continuously climbs and falls from a bust of the artist. As the animated figure moves around the bust he exposes different parts of the artists own skin. The performance is an endless loop as he struggles to reach the top. His victory is short lived though as he stumbles shortly after he reaches the summit. After the fall he simply brushes himself and begins the climb again.
A lonely lighthouse keeper rescues his fantasy: a frostbitten man on the rocks.
Peril! charts the dangerous territory of women's everyday lives. The tightrope walker vacuums across Niagara Falls while pondering employment; the bearded lady waits by the phone while holding up the world; the human cannonball hurtles through space, unsure if she will ever land, but making the best of things. Using video imagery from Dempsey and Millan's performance, " The Headless Woman" (The Western Front, January 1998), this video features acts of daredeviltry by Sharon Bajer, Lorri Millan
"The Magus" is a multi-format, process-based experimental film that explores the root of artistic creation.
DEVIATE is a short Super 8 film made specifically for the Memorial Project. While friends of Dan Moyen, who died of AIDS in 1990, talk about him, the viewer sees old footage of Dan expressing his feelings on the matter.
Is the word “Indian” a label for Canadian Aboriginals to reject or reclaim?
Grand Chief Sheila North investigates unsolved murder of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls.
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.
a Tribute to Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWGs)
A short film on the subject of Indigenous Love. What is (romantic) love? And what does it mean to you? 8 couples share their thoughts
This film is available in French only.
This work deals with the idea of sacred and profane and the Catholicism as an instrument of colonization.
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 deeply intimate look at the frightening realities of food insecurity in First Nations communities.
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.
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.
A woman transforms into Louis Riel in an exploration of Métis identity.
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.