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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.
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.
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.
As he is making a didgeridoo, Bernard Bosa tells us what vibration is for him, what it has done in his life.
"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.
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.
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.
Two sisters attempt to find common understanding amidst bickering.
A young loner struggles to make connection at a haunted summer camp.
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 presentation for filmmakers and artists with VUCAVU.com’s Digital Programming Intern, Stephanie Poruchnyk-Butler.
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 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.
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.
Lysanne poured her heart and soul in the 2012 Quebec student protests. In the midst of the movement’s demise, she loses her way and finds herself by her own thoughts and motivations...
A short documentary that details the creative and physical process of Winnipeg artist Kami Goertz.
Only by looking back, there is an understanding of finding yourself on a moon-like space.
For almost 40 years, Colette Whiten has quietly and powerfully challenged gender dynamics, political power and mass media imagery... This video portrait was commissioned by the Canada Council for the Arts and the IMAA.
Mount Rundle is about coincidence, destiny, self-affirmation, and the unpredictable nature of the creative process. The video centers on a small landscape painting the artist made at the age of twelve.
Let the House of Venus take you on a freaky ride in a funhouse of the bizarre and horrific.
Inheriting her father’s studio, Jennifer Alleyn finds herself drawn to the intimate space, still exuding the artist’s imagination.
The fear of bridges.
"This film is available in French only. Use the Search or Explore site tools to select non-dialogue or English-language films and videos." "La naissance d'une messe" met en lumière le travail des comédiens et artisans réunis autour d'André Brassard pour la création de la pièce de Michel Tremblay, Messe solennelle pour une pleine lune d'été.
The artist ponders the possibilities of reconciliation.
On 9 September 2009, artist, curator and mathematician Clint Enns downloaded Anders Weberg’s 9 hour film created specifically for the event on P2P networks. After the screening, the original film and all the material used making it was deleted.
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.
LEFT is a self-reflective video diary based on Keith Cole's successful Mayoral Campaign in 2010 for The City of Toronto's top job-Keith Cole for Mayor!
A troublesome, disabled fag hag absconds to London to find love and opportunity. But life deals her some unexpected twists when she winds up peddling drugs to the queer community and forms an unorthodox relationship with a washed-up gay male escort.
This 16mm B&W cut-out animation borrows narrative tropes from early Atari video games, silent films, and anime cartoons, offering a weird story and hybrid aesthetic.
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.
Is Ohio the fish or the phisher? The film’s sexual metaphor extends to artists, who use their own experiences as material for their work, becoming both fish and fisher, harvester and harvested. Ohio’s deeply personal documentary footage and audio recordings serve as the raw material for her exploration of class, art, and the performance of heterosexuality.
In October of 1984, the highly acclaimed New York artist, Jack Smith, came to Toronto for a week long performance/Halloween ritual at the Funnel Experimental Film Theatre. This performance, true to Smithesque form, went by three different titles: “Dance of the Sacred Foundation Application,” “Brassieres of Uranus,” and “Impacted Croissants From Outer Space.” Accompanied by the music of Yma Sumac, this short piece remains the last film documentation of this historic event.
The boy and the puppy are innocent one moment, and experienced the next (sexually). The line between outward innocence and inner corruption begins to dissolve, revealing a beautiful rot and decay. This video is essentially a running parallel with the proverbial Garden of Eden.
HOMEBELLY combines waking dreams with unsettling fragments of this and that. An icy soundscape is set to a live-action animated drama featuring a sleeping body and a persistant rock.
Adapted from a short story of the same name by Canadian author Andrew Pyper, “Breaking and Entering” is a poetic parable of a young man coming to terms with the death of his father. The film was near completion at the time of Hull's death and was subsequently finished by The Estate of Andrew Hull.
This video tells the story of a big boned butcher who finds passion and purpose. Both the public and the private lives of this “strange animal” are documented with the same mix of reverence and glee found in the exposés Bull-Dyke mocks. However, because we see the world through the eyes of the subject, this fictionalized history is filled with all the joy, pain and ambivalence each of us experiences.
Two imperfect women share one perfect body.
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?...
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.
"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.
a Tribute to Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWGs)
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 group of Vietnamese nationals is making their way to an unknown location in a shipping container to find a better life.
Video collage that approaches memory and how we remember, by overlaying images and sound, to create a disorienting moment in time.
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.
Exploring the legacy of the Indian Residential School system by looking at its history, present conditions and hopes for the future.
High Altitude explores what it means to be an Indigenous artist in the modern world.
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 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.
Transformed into a salmon, an Indigenous street artist travels through decayed urban landscapes to the forests of long ago, in this sublime mixed animation.
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.