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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.
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.education is a streaming platform that gives educators and students access to a curated selection of independent Canadian film and video art spanning more than 50 years. The shared catalogue includes documentary, fiction, experimental, and animation titles from artists across Canada, offering many unique views into the country’s cultural landscape.
VUCAVU.education is an initiative of the VUCAVU.com platform.
The VUCAVU team, in consultation with our content partners, have made the decision to slowly shut down our view-on-demand (VOD) services on our platform to make way for a new direction in our operations. VOD changes will occur on VUCAVU over the coming months. As we make changes to the platform with our developers, we will periodically update this page and share news in our regular communications.
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 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.
Follow along with Spirit Bear as he realizes the importance of learning history to make better decisions now and for future generations of kids and cubs.
This playful, poignant & memorable short shadow play, where humans take from forests whatever they desire - leaving nothing. A collaborative film by a Canadian filmmaker and a Japanese visual artist.
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 female firefighter takes her daughter along for a day on the job.
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.
A young loner struggles to make connection at a haunted summer camp.
"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.
As he is making a didgeridoo, Bernard Bosa tells us what vibration is for him, what it has done in his life.
Two sisters attempt to find common understanding amidst bickering.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Amidst a biodiverse wasteland on the brink of being enveloped by encroaching bitumen, the enigmatic Beast of the Earth materializes in a prophetic dance.
Spirit Bear's friends teach him about residential schools and how he can help with reconciliation!
The artist ponders the possibilities of reconciliation.
Hypnosis in three minutes on glittery super-8mm! An homage-sequel to the 1982 Canadian synth-classic short film, "38 Jansky Units" by Jon Krocker.
An intimate look at Martha Fleming and Lyne Lapointe’ s work, and more specifically Materia Prima, a project for the abandoned garden of an historical landmark in Sao Paulo, Brasil.
Venus is born again in the Canadian wilderness, as muse, artist, and catfish
Port Lands presents Toronto’s industrial waterfront as a complex landscape in which past, present, and future geographies transition and converge.
Scarborough Bluffs (1974): a woman walks away from us, through a field of grass. Approaching a treeline, she turns and crosses the frame.
...stepped solitude of a shoe cobbler drifting in absence
Lysanne poured her heart and soul in the 2012 Quebec student protests. In the midst of the movement’s demise, she loses her way and finds herself by her own thoughts and motivations...
A constantly alternating positive and negative image.
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.
Un feu de paroles, en lectures et en entrevues, de Jean-Claude Labrecque à Michel Garneau en passant par François Charron et Louise Dupré, permettant d’aborder les thèmes de l’oralité, de l’influence du féminisme et de l’engagement dans la poésie actuelle.
A boreal forest, in the fall. A man wearing a face mask is on the watch. Camouflaged in the bush, he holds his gun at the ready. Is he a serial killer or just a trophy hunter? He’s neither. He’s an artist waiting for an animal and that elusive moment when the image for a work will come to him.
A woman is dragged through an empty field in scenario reminiscent of horror movies and news stories. But she is alert, impassive, and remains vigilantly focused on the camera. This hand-processed, Super 8 film juxtaposes degraded, awkwardly-staged footage of every woman's worst nightmare with an interior monologue regarding media representation of sexualized violence. The piece asks how violent, misogynist images play out in our psyches and in our culture. The film was commissioned by 8fest, To
Cupid gets beaten at his own game.
There are challenges one faces as a New Canadian.
Back to school - A XXX queer cartoon fantasy!
Produced for Much Music’s Word Up program, "What Does a Lesbian Look Like?" examines a plethora of big dyke stereotypes and embraces them. Performed by Shawna Dempsey and a whole whack of gals. Created by Dempsey and Millan.
In “Milkman,” a seated male figure sits staring endlessly ahead, his gaze locked on the viewer. Milk is streaming from his nipple and into a glass that he holds in his left hand. The continuous flow of milk never seems to fill the glass. The sound of the flowing milk creates a human fountain out of this portrait.
disobedience is the visually lush journey of a mother on the lam. Warned by her three-year old son to " never go down to the end of the town", she nonetheless ventures far beyond the confines of home, heterosexuality, and the physical world. In punishment for her infatuation with an operatic Valkyrie, she is arrested, interned, stolen by pirates, and x-rayed by a book-eating bull-dyke. She loses her eye (and her way home), but in the end receives the gift of self.
Butch women discuss the sometimes complicated relationship they have with their breasts.
HOMEBELLY combines waking dreams with unsettling fragments of this and that. An icy soundscape is set to a live-action animated drama featuring a sleeping body and a persistant rock.
Stay Away is a video poem about the feeling of being apart.
"Love on The Prairies" brings light to current-day homophobia in Saskatchewan, Canada. We have come far, but there's still a ways to go.
This work is a fantasy of freedom, in which a stroll in the park gives rise to an opening up of unstable sexual codes, shifting identities and the empowering game of come and go.
This video interrogates how subjectivities, political stances, and modes of social engagement formed elsewhere contribute to our positioning within the local, cultural landscape of Vancouver.
Numb, questions Kanata’s relationship with Indigenous peoples, allowing the viewer to contemplate the next 150 year relationship.
This film is available in French only.
Founder: Noun- a person who establishes an institution or settlement. Verb- (of a ship) fill with water and sink. (of a plan or undertaking) fail or break down.
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.
Burning an Effigy considers intergenerational legacies of the Indian residential schools, the colonial presence, and its persistent impacts on community.
WÎSKACÂN is an experimental contemporary dance film utilizing Bunraku-style tabletop puppetry and object performance. Video, Puppet Design, Performance, and Music by Tyson Houseman. This project was made as part of Canada Council for the Arts Digital Originals initiative, and I acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.
Gaawiin Gego [Got No Nothing] is based on a rhyme in Ojibwe that my great aunt taught me, the lyrics reference the blues and a Nina Simone song. The audio track is layered over top of found video footage from Lac Des Mille Lacs, which is the lake beside our Reserve
Grand Chief Sheila North investigates unsolved murder of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls.
Video collage that approaches memory and how we remember, by overlaying images and sound, to create a disorienting moment in time.
Exploring the legacy of the Indian Residential School system by looking at its history, present conditions and hopes for the future.
Since the launch of the VUCAVU platform, we've collaborated with hundreds of artists, arts organizations and educators from across Canada to present bilingual curated and educational programming online. Artists always receive royalties and screening fees from these programs and they often include additional educational resources such as recordings of roundtable discussions and artist talks. After the paid or free programming period expires, available artworks can be rented individually.
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.
Discover our new VUCAVU.education postcards designed by Emil Woudenberg from Strike Design Studio, featuring a still from Caroline Blais’ film “Étoiles” (available for VOD on VUCAVU!). We’re pleased to pay Caroline for using their image and are dedicated to building VUCAVU in community with artists.