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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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A group of Vietnamese nationals is making their way to an unknown location in a shipping container to find a better life.
Riverside Queerness reveals hard moments in the Prairies' shadowed queer history. Three storytellers navigate muddy waters that is Manitoba's subconsciousness; where truth is blurred by the power of the currents.
A group of amateur astronomers and eclipse-chasers prepare to view a total eclipse.
I lost my mind from working at a government call centre. This is my story.
Clash of cultures, care of the elderly and four women trying to make sense of their unravelling family, this is Mum Singh.
An intimate portrayal of the closed-off Russian city of Norilsk through the eyes of its youth, mine workers and truth seekers.
Short descriptionThe conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan as seen through the eyes of the inhabitants of the Caucasus.
Çås¢a∂ing €®r0r Win∂0ws is a project about love, death, connection, the future, and the afterlife. It is an exploration of artificial intelligence, human consciousness, and embodiment that troubles deeply held convictions about what it means to be alive, to be a person, and to be in conversation with another.
Night Circled was made by recording video from online surveillance cameras.
An optimistic Filipina woman who has just immigrated to Canada is excited to try an apple for the first time. Similar to her experiences as a new immigrant, the apple isn't what she expected.
Captured over five years in 18 communities, INDIAN TIME paints a personal, up-to-date portrait of 11 of Quebec's Indigenous peoples. With some forty people speaking in turn, INDIAN TIME makes for exceptional encounters and immerses viewers in "Indian time" with their eyes and hearts.
"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.
Border mechanisms that act on migrants are many. Moving from shelter to shelter and hopping on trains, they head up north across Mexico to reach the United States and Canada. During the U.S election, migrants are more than aware that it could be their last chance to cross the border. Following their trajectory, Destierros draws a path of reclusion. A path where time remains the longest road between two places.
An examination of how art and truth come into conflict at the trial of a young man accused of rape.
An austere film with touches of offbeat humour
A woman paints with her vagina to please the art hungry masses that crowd her gallery and her life.
A woman deals with the death of her mother through self-annihilating tendencies.
Métis, Métis Not is a video documentation of the filmmaker’s lack of relationship with her cultural background
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.
A short film essay analyzing a landscape shaped by religion, capital, and war. The film blurs the line between memory and history, only to reveal their cyclicity.
Since launching our platform in 2017, we have collaborated with curators and programmers from across the country to present film and video programs available for free streaming for a limited time. Each program includes a critical curatorial essay that explores the overarching themes and selections. After the free viewing period has expired, we encourage the public to read the essays and rent the works individually.
An inventory of lost memories and places, the sun bleached landscape of Saskatchewan serves as a metaphor for displacement, a framing of emptiness and absence. Traveling to forgotten towns and channeled through old family photographs the camera catalogues the haunting remnants of the past, frail monuments and communities laid bare, broken under economic collapse. Under the weight of the prairie skies a visceral, personal encounter is revealed in the solace of open space.
There are places that we seek, and there are places that find us.
Buildings rise from the rubble, defying gravity to re-imagine their fate and the possibility of affordable housing for all.
An ordinary rural landscape is transformed into an enigmatic dreamscape. A farmhouse stands in a copper field of scratched emulsion as solarized flares illuminate the sky. Split toned horses amble dreamlike across the frame into inky underexposed blackness.
Alexandre Castonguay, actor, undertakes a poetic pilgrimage through north-western Quebec, covering more than 700 km by foot under the hot July sun.
Things as they are are changed upon the blue guitar.
Boyer reflects on her family’s displacement from the Souris Valley (now McDonald Lake) by way of the construction of the Rafferty Dam in 1988. In the two-channel video installation, Boyer canoes out to the original location of her family’s farm and the Souris Valley Métis community, now submerged at the bottom of the lake, and in a playful and contemplative gesture, swims the site.
In observing the volatility and liquid nature of what appears to be solid, “Second Phase” exists as a discovery of form through process and quietly observes a community space that remains constant amongst all the things that pass through it.
“Did you ever see Diana Ross in person? You wouldn’t believe her arms. They are so thin, it’s pathetic, and when she’s on stage, you can see all her veins, like stringy little ropes all over her arms. ” D.M.
The 1990 Oka crisis from the perception of a child and performed by the survivors, 25 years later.
This movie focuses on a condo site rising on Toronto's lakeshore, whose projects are being financed by Sotheby's fine art auction house, amongst others.
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.
Memories are bridges.
An amusing selection of tips for achieving independent womanhood - 1800s to 1920.
Imaginary love is better than real loneliness.
The Headless Woman is a monologue by Shawna Dempsey that recounts a revelatory love story between a headless woman and a sword-swallowing man. It was performed live with a pianist and bass clarinetist who provide emphatic musical interludes and interjections and create a cabaret-style atmosphere.
Contre Bande is about the power of sexual play/pleasure and the attempt to filter these images through strict cultural hierarchies. In much of the work I do sexuality becomes an oscillation - a diabolical double sex that breaks with all oppositions and hierarchies. In the performance/ video installation Contre Bande, each sex binds one to the other, speaking the language of the other; binding and counter-binding.
The guertita, a white American woman, and the prietita, a South Asian Canadian woman, have an affair while on a tourist trip to Mexico.
Playing with sexuality and erotic imagery, this short looks at taboos and different ideas of what’s hot.
Set to music by Little Hawk, this animated and starkly honest story is a daughter’s tribute to her estranged mother.
This film is available in French only.
Recitations not from memory is an experiment in recounting gendered experience, and particularly gender discrimination, within the urban Indian context.
Colette Balcaen’s artistic expression, transmitted through textiles, is informed by a passion for her language and culture.
In the stories of adoption, the mothers who gave birth were invisible. Exiled Mothers takes us on the artist Sharon Alward’s journey to recover her own repressed, secret, shaming memories from relinquishing her daughter in 1971.
The little-known editor of the epic opus Shoah, Ziva Postec delves into her memories, where personal recollection mingles with the shards of History. For the first time, she tells her story, bringing previously unseen footage to the screen.
The film depicts a society controlled by an autonomous system.
A true story of hope, ethnic cleansing and letting go.
Within a few months, the Kutupalong refugee camp has become the biggest in the world, home to 700 000 Rohingya exiles fighting for their survival.
Shot improvisationally in 2010, shortly after the end of the Sri Lankan civil war, this film takes a lyrical approach to examining recent history and the process of reconstruction in the post-war era.
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.
SURGES is an online ecosystem of seven virtual environments presented by IOTA Institute in partnership with VUCAVU. This project invites artists to design online exhibition spaces with technical support, to create experiences for audiences beyond linear visual aesthetics. Artworks explore vibrational haptics, interactive instruments, 360 video, and augmented reality to create multisensory online experiences and encounters.