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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.
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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.
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.
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.
Two sisters attempt to find common understanding amidst bickering.
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.
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.
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.
Clash of cultures, care of the elderly and four women trying to make sense of their unravelling family, this is Mum Singh.
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!
As he is making a didgeridoo, Bernard Bosa tells us what vibration is for him, what it has done in his life.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
A young loner struggles to make connection at a haunted summer camp.
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.
Since the launch of the VUCAVU platform in 2016, we have collaborated with artists, educators, and arts organizations across the country to present a wide variety of independent Canadian films and video art online. Artists are always compensated for the dissemination of their works, and the artworks can often be rented individually for VOD viewing after the programming free period has expired. Programs are always accompanied by bilingual curatorial texts exploring the themes addressed in the selection, and many of them also include recordings of roundtable discussions and conversations with the artists!
On a hill, a girl re-imagines her journey of survival. Spoken word and layered visuals create an intense urban tale of personal transformation.
Afro hair goes Beyond Curls & Kinks
Meet Montreal's Mambo Drag Kings, a dapper group of lip synching lesbians who entertain in style.
A non-linear narrative about women, witches and contemporary reclaiming of women’s spirituality.
Year by year, the “Canadian” style of pronunciation is challenged by a deluge of U.S.A. media. By peering into the mists of his own childhood, Ferris presents a tongue-in-cheek look at what our alphabet may once have been -- with subliminal Canadiana thrown in for good measure.
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."
When both her grandmothers are diagnosed with the early onset of dementia, filmmaker A. Megan Turnbull feels a strong compulsion to return to Winnipeg and make a film about them.
A constructed cinematic space where life and death exist.
At times painful and disturbing, Still Sane's overriding theme is ultimately one of defiance and survival: we can maintain our choices, even in the face of literally mind-numbing oppression.
Can’t Help Falling in Love with You follows Laura Ohio documenting Los Angeles through the dual lens of artist and sex worker. The film reveals the production of emotional experiences and the radical intimacy in which “artists and prostitutes are compelled to connect with complete strangers: a public. They share themselves with everyone but no one in particular” (Baudelaire).
A young Aboriginal girl's hopes and dreams are re-negotiated within the walls and tunnels of the institution of education.
Shiro Yagi is an experimental animated film, inspired by the last sheet of existing music of the artist’s maternal grandfather.
"Those That Will Come, Will Hear" constructs a portrait of the erosion of languages; a global phenomenon that is still largely unexplored. This exploratory film will be a way to discover the essence of First Nations and Inuit languages still spoken in Quebec via the richness of their unique sounds and the rendering of this inherent musicality into visual imagery.
One Story was originally produced as part of the Community Play “Travois” in 1994. It is a look into the various complicated and overlapping stories that inform the current urban and traditional culture of the First Nations peoples. The questionable politics that dictate Status and the paternalism of Treaty Days are juxtaposed with the pow wow, the voice of graffiti and the street.
The Weaver's Circle is a short documentary film portrait of an environmental artist working in the downtown eastside of Vancouver.
Two ersatz “Indian warriors” chase a beautiful Indian maiden through the streets of Winnipeg but she loves Chief Big Bear. Who is the hunter, and who the hunted in this tableaux?
When Land and Body Merge began with the artists and curator meeting online, and over a two month period creating work through video and writing that allowed them to connect and build a relationship from afar. They worked with the idea of a call and response with Lindsay creating work, and Jaime responding to it, and vice versa.
Set to music by Little Hawk, this animated and starkly honest story is a daughter’s tribute to her estranged mother.
In a relationship, two women decide that the white partner will carry her partner’s Indigenous child.
Réflexion sur le rôle et le pouvoir des femmes dans les communautés autochtones du Nord et du Sud.
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.
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 spoken word poem about Indigenous issues from the perspective of three different Native women.
A distinct world – that is often an isolated part of a larger world – is viscerally envisioned in this uniquely hand- processed film.
Skin Deep leads us into worlds where people are never what they appear to be.
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.
Le film documentaire trace le portrait d'une jeune femme, Angèle, ayant décidé de partir seule explorer les routes des États-Unis.
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.
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.
Trying to revisit her pre-baby days by taking a trip to China, the filmmaker realize how much she has changed.
A tactile journey in three parts. Markings 1-3 is an attempt to connect with nature through the surface of celluloid, using such techniques as tinting, toning, painting and scratching.This film was shot and hand processed at the Independent Imaging Retreat (The Film Farm) in Mount Forest Ontario.
Other Half Dating Service, the artist references dating videos from the 1980’s where individuals would discuss the type of partner that they were looking for.
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.
A home movie of Cree woman hunting is saved from being lost forever, but how does it compare to official Canadian history of northern Manitoba?
A series of tableaux vivants revisit the paths that have been traced by a diagnosis.
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!