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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.
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 young loner struggles to make connection at a haunted summer camp.
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 presentation for filmmakers and artists with VUCAVU.com’s Digital Programming Intern, Stephanie Poruchnyk-Butler.
Two sisters attempt to find common understanding amidst bickering.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Clash of cultures, care of the elderly and four women trying to make sense of their unravelling family, this is Mum Singh.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A group of Vietnamese nationals is making their way to an unknown location in a shipping container to find a better life.
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!
"Death by Popcorn" follows the ill-fated Jets through their many travails with arch-enemies Wayne Gretzky and the Edmonton Oilers, soul-crushing NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman and many other agents of Winnipeg annihilation. Sadness on ice.
A deathbed tale. A skeptical daughter. A genealogical goose chase to the remote Icelandic highland.
In three parallel worlds, two lovers meet, lust, disappoint and drink coffee and it's time for the cycle to change.
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.
Trying to revisit her pre-baby days by taking a trip to China, the filmmaker realize how much she has changed.
This is a Photograph of Me is a video poem using Margaret Atwood’s poem of the same name as a script. A gentle visual meandering, the landscape, water, and cabin as metaphor for body, and how we are placed, and place ourselves, psychologically in space.
The guertita, a white American woman, and the prietita, a South Asian Canadian woman, have an affair while on a tourist trip to Mexico.
"Vessel for a lower Ocean" is a docu-poem which explores difficult questions around body memory and communication.
A queer couple documents their journey to become pregnant.
Did you ever have a crush on Anne Murray, singing her greatest hits with your dress tucked into your pantyhose? And what about Anne of Green Gables?
How would you react to past situations? Are you over past issues and do new ones arise? Nicole Shimonek and Victoria Prince discuss the implications of the video of a younger Nicole writing on a chalkboard.
A woman reconnects with her grandmother's past through drawings done by Daphne Odjig
Filmmaker Jesse Green travels to his home community of Shoal Lake 40 interviewing people about the impacts of the City of Winnipeg aqueduct in the 100+ years since it was built
A distinct world – that is often an isolated part of a larger world – is viscerally envisioned in this uniquely hand- processed film.
A portrait of visual artist Rebecca Belmore.
Invited to speak at an Indigenous Revolutionary Meeting, the narrator describes an intimate encounter with an Evil Colonizing Queen which led to Turtle Island's contraction of an invasive European flora.
After Birth, an inter-generational journey to return to a ceremonial custom of burying the ‘after birth.’ Together three women and their kids walk the land and affirm their intergenerational knowledge and active presence in ancestral memories and matrilineal leadership.
A video collage based on twenty-eight tracking shots of city scenes.
A journalist gets more than bargained for while interviewing a strange local on recent disappearances.
A place called home, a North End poem.
Réflexion sur le rôle et le pouvoir des femmes dans les communautés autochtones du Nord et du Sud.
Dedicated to the artist’s father, this experimental tape begins sorting through identities contaminated by the generalized racism of white society and its degrading commercial exploitation of Native culture, i.e., “Indian” drums and doll souvenirs. Five young natives search for reconnection to their families, their stories, traditions and their role within community.
"Buried Traces" is an 8 minute experimental documentary exploring questions of Métis identity, cultural loss and renewal.
Trade is an experimental video short exploring concepts of borders and trade, and their relationship to notions of collective history and national identity in the North American colonial context.
A video animation that appropriates and subverts still images from early colonial Canadian immigration advertising. This is an audience sing-along.
A brief proposal of other-creaturely perceptions of time and space as translated through technology into the human sensorium.
Jenny Johnson is the story of a girl who takes desperate measures to get her ears pierced.
How do girls learn about the hair that mysteriously appears on their bodies during puberty?
Every night, Agathe meets William in her dreams, oneiric paradise where her handicap no longer exists.
Discovering Composition in Art uses found footage as source material for various darkroom experiments.
When our intrepid heroine Darcy gets her heart broken on her 30th birthday, her friends rally around to help her recover.
The artist ponders the possibilities of reconciliation.
The real encloses the remembered. A poetic look at the distorting / defining effect of memory.
Originally a multichannel video installation at the Royal Ontario Museum, Archaeology and You contemplates fallen empires, language and the motivating power of fear.
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.
A squirrel ponders the essence of time.