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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.
Clash of cultures, care of the elderly and four women trying to make sense of their unravelling family, this is Mum Singh.
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.
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 young loner struggles to make connection at a haunted summer camp.
Spirit Bear's friends teach him about residential schools and how he can help with reconciliation!
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.
As he is making a didgeridoo, Bernard Bosa tells us what vibration is for him, what it has done in his life.
Amidst a biodiverse wasteland on the brink of being enveloped by encroaching bitumen, the enigmatic Beast of the Earth materializes in a prophetic dance.
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.
Two sisters attempt to find common understanding amidst bickering.
A presentation for filmmakers and artists with VUCAVU.com’s Digital Programming Intern, Stephanie Poruchnyk-Butler.
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.
The Weaver's Circle is a short documentary film portrait of an environmental artist working in the downtown eastside of Vancouver.
The Presider
Originally a multichannel video installation at the Royal Ontario Museum, Archaeology and You contemplates fallen empires, language and the motivating power of fear.
A film on the Dare strike of the early 1970s. Hundreds of feet and legs, milling, marching and picketing with the word “solidarity” superimposed on the screen.
A video poem about a day in the life of two young men.
"Stillness of remote places where I tend to feel the most focused." K.T.
Facing the Monsters Within
Galvanized by the opportunity promised by the looming North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), a shy and idealistic Winnipeg artist seeks fame and fortune in the USA. Heading for the international border on the notorious "Night Bus to Fargo", she meets a host of hinterland hopefuls also making a break for the great cultural supermarket south of the 49th.
"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.
While filming his native land, David B. Ricard is entrusted with the task of documenting the creating process of a show of poetry and music across the Canadian Francophonie. This project gives him the opportunity to question the relationship to rooting (land, language), adaptation (poetry, territory) and the process of relationship with the other (team, subject).
The result of a collaboration between artists Nahed Mansour and Kandis Friesen, this work is based on the original footage from an unrealized documentary found at the Mennonite Heritage Centre Archives in Winnipeg Manitoba.
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.
There are things in life you never forget. One of them, like it or not, is "The Talk".
"In ‘(ab)NORMAL’ the relationship spectrum, from paranoid avoidance to smothering and overwhelming attention, is traced through four pixilated sketches." - Toronto International Film Festival
"The Way We Are" shares excerpts of stories from audio interviews with 4 queer Asian women living in Toronto: Katherine Chun, Wenda Li, Tamai Kobayashi, and Nancy Seto. Told in the present-tense, these stories are arranged in a way that explores the past as the present, and in doing so, immersing viewers into the real-lived experiences from a different generation.
Gay dating in a nutshell.
Built from artifacts recovered from her own then her mother's storage closet, “Confessions of a Compulsive Archivist “follows the filmmaker's tragic-comic struggle to let go of a few things of obviously no use to her. Part found footage film, part camera-less video, it turns stuff that should have been thrown out long ago into a poignant study of the relationship between the creative imagination and our attachments, be they material or emotional.
A masked crochetist shows us his sudden immersion into crochet art.
Loveletter to Saint Boniface is a bilingual experimental documentary that unravels personal and community memories regarding racism and homophobia while exploring notions of language and culture.
A gay man speaks about his body image and growing older in the age of the internet.
Première manifestation de l'artiste en Femme toupie, cette oeuvre explore le mouvement comme stratégie de déstabilisation de la normalité.
Inside a drab middle school in 1992, a sexually-confused eighth-grader attempts to regain his dignity after being bullied by a sex-obsessed 'cool kid' whom he privately fantasizes about.
The Depth of Scars
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.
Exploring the legacy of the Indian Residential School system by looking at its history, present conditions and hopes for the future.
Toronto, July 27, 2013, shortly after midnight.
“The Script” presents a collage of revealing moments pulled from material in the Prelinger Archives, an online collection of over 11,000 "ephemeral" (advertising, educational, industrial and amateur) films made between the 1910s – 1980s.
Burning an Effigy considers intergenerational legacies of the Indian residential schools, the colonial presence, and its persistent impacts on community.
It's New Year's Eve in Tijuana, Mexico.
The artist ponders the possibilities of reconciliation.
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
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.
Video collage that approaches memory and how we remember, by overlaying images and sound, to create a disorienting moment in time.
She Draws a Circle reflects on the work of generations of women to interrupt cycles of violence and oppression, looking to the ways in which our spiritual connections to the land and one another help us to hold space for regenerative healing, bringing the hidden to light drawing on that light to encircle each successive generation.
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.
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.