We're sorry, but our site requires Javascript to be enabled. If you would like instructions on how to enable Javascript, please click here.
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 is delighted to launch three new programs in the Educational Guide series from Archive/Counter-Archive (A/CA); 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.
Our payment processing company has informed us that the online form employed to add a site users' payment info to their VUCAVU Rental Account will stop functioning on February 28th, 2025. The estimated cost to fix this form is prohibitive pricey. While we weigh our options and look for funding to mitigate the change, for now, this form will be allowed to lapse.
Fanny meets her high school friends for the annual Switch & Bitch Party.
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 young loner struggles to make connection at a haunted summer camp.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Two sisters attempt to find common understanding amidst bickering.
"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.
As he is making a didgeridoo, Bernard Bosa tells us what vibration is for him, what it has done in his life.
Spirit Bear's friends teach him about residential schools and how he can help with reconciliation!
Clash of cultures, care of the elderly and four women trying to make sense of their unravelling family, this is Mum Singh.
Artist Talk with Farrah Miranda & Evelyn Encalada Grez (With Audio Description)
Stay Away is a video poem about the feeling of being apart.
Since launching our platform in 2017, VUCAVU has collaborated with several curators and arts organizations from across Canada to present film and media art programs. Each program includes a text exploring the themes addressed, and many also include recordings of roundtable discussions and artist talks for you to discover!
The artist ponders the possibilities of reconciliation.
Skin Deep leads us into worlds where people are never what they appear to be.
A year of pictures mash into an intense viewing experience.
Funambule moves between the open expanses of the grasslands to the dark shadows of a cedar grove where a traveler and a hunter beckon us to the heart of the forest.
"Buried Traces" is an 8 minute experimental documentary exploring questions of Métis identity, cultural loss and renewal.
A Johannesburg neighourhood unites five people’s ambitions, desires, and struggles to survive over the course of a Friday.
Empowering Rural Women of Rajasthan is a video that shows Lodha’s colourful heritage, the music she learned in her childhood and her love for the women of Rajasthan. She focusses her attention on a group of women engaged in digging a community ditch, and shows the strong bonds that bind these women through the sharing of food and song. Empowering Rural Women of Rajasthan was produced as part of the New Artist in New Media Fund program at Video Pool Media Arts Centre.
This journey led to the creation of a 30 minute documentary film in which Henteleff presents a personal, point-of-view account of the Taharah beginning in the Jewish mortuary and ending at the moment of burial.
A film crew journeys to resurrect a lost film, taking it to the communities where the film was originally shot. Images come to life; people recognize faces, landscapes, and lost traditions.
The performer attempts to apply make-up while wearing electro stimulators on both arms set to maximum power.
Daring to follow one’s desires, create, initiate, engage with life, choose oneself… These are the gifts of maturity.
A story of an elderly woman who puts on her jewelry. Each treasured piece brings a reminder of the life she once had, filled with ballet, love, freedom and joy. Her current reality fades and she is renewed in the world of her past.
A distinct world – that is often an isolated part of a larger world – is viscerally envisioned in this uniquely hand- processed film.
Burning an Effigy considers intergenerational legacies of the Indian residential schools, the colonial presence, and its persistent impacts on community.
A deeply intimate look at the frightening realities of food insecurity in First Nations communities.
After his family's untimely demise in 1945, George Bassler bizarrely crafts a perpetual motion machine.
A nephew's journey
A woman transforms into Louis Riel in an exploration of Métis identity.
With lyrics by Nishnaabeg poet Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, How to Steal a Canoe tells the story of a young Nishnaabeg woman and an old Nishnaabeg man rescuing a canoe from a museum and returning it to the lake where it was meant to be.
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.
Grand Mother Tongue pairs poetry, spoken in Plains Cree, and breath with the intimate imagery of strawberries being consumed bite-by-bite, and finger lick for finger lick.
The story of a man lost in the Arctic during a blizzard and his mysterious rescuer
When Marc Roger, a public reader, sets himself the challenge of walking from Saint-Malo, France, to Bamako, Mali, along with a donkey laden with books to be read aloud, filmmaker Catherine Hébert (The Other Side of the Country) joins him in Morocco, her camera rolling."
Moving images are captured as a doctor goes about his day in a busy medical clinic entering five patients' rooms.
Nicole plays with and counts five buds from a shrub on a miniature stage.
Set to music by Little Hawk, this animated and starkly honest story is a daughter’s tribute to her estranged mother.
Languages define their worlds and memories.
Bali is a magical place, and the story of Prince Bhima’s journey to the underworld, to rescue the souls of his parents is a magical story. The Balinese Hindu myth is based on the life of a minor figure in the Indian “Mahabarata”. Using brilliant watercolour painting, the artist interprets this old Hindu story in a unique way.
In this two channel video, the image of cutting and sewing a pure white cloth underpins a narration about clean laundry, comfortable chairs, moths, dust and death, drawing parallels between repetition in the home, and tradition in the House of God.
Set against the bleak landscape of Depression-era Eastern Ontario, this film tells the story of Joanna McVeigh and her struggle to endure a harsh and unforgiving life
What happens when a mother discovers that her child is being sexually abused? In this tape, four women speak of their experiences.
The story of a deteriorating love affair is piggy-backed on a document of police-enforced plant destruction for the benefit of a Hong Kong developer.
Notions of externalized and internalized journeys, identity and place, and the mundane and the exotic are explored in a series of clips from an imagined nature documentary series. At question is our spiritual and psychological relationship with the land and how we project our unmet needs and desires onto it.
Every breath I take, I can thank a tree. My life is a gift of the global forest.
Shiro Yagi is an experimental animated film, inspired by the last sheet of existing music of the artist’s maternal grandfather.