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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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Sydnie Baynes is a Toronto-based multimedia artist and animator currently studying at OCAD University. She holds a BFA in Film Animation and creates work that explores Black history, identity, and self-love through storytelling and digital media. Her artistic practice bridges the worlds of education and independent media, with a focus on accessibility, empowerment, and cultural preservation. Welcome to the team Sydnie!
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.
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 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 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!
"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.
Clash of cultures, care of the elderly and four women trying to make sense of their unravelling family, this is Mum Singh.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Two sisters attempt to find common understanding amidst bickering.
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: CENSORSHIP dossier. The envelope and folders are opened and the contents examined.
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.
Open Water is an immersive short documentary film about a 61-year-old woman's attempt to swim across the largest freshwater lake in the world.
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!
An ode to my daily environment.
For Canadian-born women of Chinese origin, the wearing of this dress is fraught with tensions between desire and fear, wonder and contestation.
An experimental documentary that explores the complicated process of decolonization and reveals how our memory and history are ingrained in our sense of identification.
"Buried Traces" is an 8 minute experimental documentary exploring questions of Métis identity, cultural loss and renewal.
Khoa Lê chronicles his trip to Vietnam, visiting his remote family for the end of the year festivities.
The camera scans a woman’s body in microscopic detail. A voice-over asks such questions as, “what is the dividing line between the public and the private?”.
In February, 1998, the artist traveled back to Hong Kong to revisit his elementary school, La Salle Primary. Time has changed but there are still the same Chinese Catholic boys in school uniforms.
FILM(knout) concentrates on a young woman who sets down to the task of tying rope. Meanwhile she has the same idea, and a confrontation of self endures.
Inkster’s beautiful fiction references the destruction of Africville on the outskirts of Halifax in 1969. Four characters speak directly to the came ra about their lives and sexuality. This use of direct address says docu mentary, but the actors speak Inkster’s bittersweet words.
"This film is available in French only. Use the Search or Explore site tools to select non-dialogue or English-language films and videos." In 1970, Hungarian-Québécois photographer Gabor Szilasi set out for the Charlevoix region of Québec to photograph the last vestiges of a disappearing rural world.
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.
Skin Deep leads us into worlds where people are never what they appear to be.
The forbidden love between an Owl and a Fox drives them away from friends and family as they search for happiness together.
Spirit Bear tells a tragic story of Jordan River Anderson, and unfairness towards Indigenous Kids.
milkteeth is an investigation into the imperfection of memory and attempts at preserving the ephemeral.
Fleeting Encounters
A film about the annual gathering at South Indian Lake, Manitoba.
Filmmaker Coleen Rajotte returns to Pikangikum First Nation in northwestern Ontario, a community with an unusually high suicide rate.
"Muskeg Special" was one of the first 'official' Winnipeg Film Group productions back in 1979 when a group of intrepid independents ventured North with a 16mm Arriflex and the curiosity to discover what life was like in small communities along the Hudson Bay Rail line. That summer also marked the 50th Anniversary of completion of the rail line from The Pas to Churchill (approximately 510 miles) providing a reference point for the journey.
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.
A resourceful young Métis man comes to the rescue of family, friends and strangers in this amusing short film.
Waking up after thousands of years of being encased in ice, the voice of a creature is heard, emerging to find that the world is a much different place, although some things remain the same, he is hungry, and he is still an Apex predator, at the top of the food chain. The soundtrack is composed of samples of audio from the largest mass calving event in recorded history (when arctic ice melts and collapses into the ocean). There's a new monster in town.
The fear of bridges.
A woman reconnects with her grandmother's past through drawings done by Daphne Odjig
Entrainment ritual to assemble from missing parts, 2017, documents an installation experiment in my studio. This layered assemblage of domestic and landscape imagery and sound tethers my present environs with some half-fictional, nostalgic place.
In Camouflage (Boulder/Iceland) the artist utilizes the photograph object to investigate the difference between a lithic and a human sense of time.
The Complete Book of Roses—pages 1–114. A brief glimpse of the disconnect between digital devices and recording the “natural.” Made during Video Pool’s Media Arts Residency (2019-2020) using the Apollo monitor and microscope camera.
Danger is a cautionary tale of the omnipresent Mao-era type of control system still in place in China, in which officials exercise power over every aspect of an individual’s life.
Set to music by Little Hawk, this animated and starkly honest story is a daughter’s tribute to her estranged mother.
An elderly man living with dementia invites an unexpected guest over for lunch.
A single-subject portrait of a young Nunamiut athlete through the practice of his sport, which focuses on the materiality of film and its surface textures.
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.
A celebration of the strength, wisdom, beauty and humour of Native women; of Native culture and people, surviving and thriving.
Pierre is a Montreal born belly dancer of Syrian origin. Belly dance is an art that is mainly performed by women, but men also have a role in the history of this dance. This short documentary presents Pierre’s story as well as...
Inspired by the story of Reena Virk. The backward narrative reveals the banal motives behind the murder of a teenager in a small B.C. town.
Based on a true story from Regina’s history, an argument over sheet music leads to a quarrel of sorts in Victoria Park.