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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.
A presentation for filmmakers and artists with VUCAVU.com’s Digital Programming Intern, Stephanie Poruchnyk-Butler.
Clash of cultures, care of the elderly and four women trying to make sense of their unravelling family, this is Mum Singh.
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: PORN Dossier. The envelope and folders are opened and the contents examined.
Amidst a biodiverse wasteland on the brink of being enveloped by encroaching bitumen, the enigmatic Beast of the Earth materializes in a prophetic dance.
"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.
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.
Spirit Bear's friends teach him about residential schools and how he can help with reconciliation!
A young loner struggles to make connection at a haunted summer camp.
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.
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.
The fear of bridges.
As he is making a didgeridoo, Bernard Bosa tells us what vibration is for him, what it has done in his life.
A parody of the art film where sentimentality and self-consciousness are brought to an absurd level.
David Roche looks out from the screen and starts to talk about love as he rises in the freight elevator to his lofty abode.
HOOLBOOM is a film that Arts Toronto commissioned local filmmaker Wrik Mead to make based on his impressions of fellow filmmaker Mike Hoolboom.
On a cold fall evening, Leila is left alone to tend the family convenience store. A series of strange clients keep her in a constant state of apprehension. Language and cultural barriers also contribute to the making of a nerve-racking evening.
A sonorous meditation on the distance between perception and measurement.
Out of their spartan lives, two humble, elderly Moscovites carve an imaginary world – a space of identity created in solitude. Following the social upheaval of Russia art becomes a lifeline for these seasoned cast-offs.
Employing a simple three-part structure, PATH is about personal experience and the interpretation of that experience.
A young man takes break from work, skateboarding along to see his favourite Winnipeg murals.
"All That Is Solid" investigates Brutalist architecture through the surface of black and white celluloid.
A young woman, sicker than those who dare to eat the food at the all-night diner she's perched in, catches a ghostly reflection of herself as a child. This inspires a topsy-turvy cataclysm, hermetically sealed within a huge wheel rolling through a movie studio.
Submerged Queer Spaces is a documentary feature that examines queer history through an approach of urban archeology.
The film focuses on the social ecology of Highway 59, the road to the Beaconia Research Station in Manitoba.
"You're just a woman.... smile and relax."
A short experimental film about the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike. The film centres on a fictional group of gay men who frequent a Chinese bathhouse, which happens to be strike headquarters. This specific site, where men from all walks of life meet for anonymous sex, becomes the point of convergence for the bloody riots. The film culminates in a reinvented ending of the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike.
Poet RM Vaughan muses on his relationship to 50s film noir tough guy hunk Sterling Hayden, and why he cannot make his life more like a 50s film noir masterpiece. Created by video/internet artist Jared Mitchell, the film inserts Vaughan into the rain-dappled, shadowed and dreamy world of film noir - turning the poet into Hayden’s moll, lover, and dumb broad.
This short documentary-style interview film takes a quick look at some key terms that originated within queer Black and POC communities (such as the ballroom scene), tracing their cultural significance to contemporary mainstream popular culture.
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.
The “Manholes” series takes a pan of a single male figure and fragments it into a grid of peepholes. The microscopic mapping of the body is intimate yet clinical. The cascading body parts create a kaleidoscope of changing skin tones. It is difficult to find the point of origin on the subject’s body, though occasionally signifiers make it possible; an eye, a nipple or the toes suddenly orient the viewer.
Portrait of young contemporary feminists. In an era that has stated the death of ideologies, these young people still believe in a better world!
Porn star, Ryan Russell is rotoscoped in this performance about ego and Eros. In the tradition of the peepshow a private sexual performance is made public. A lone figure enters the frame, smirks at the camera and gets down to business. Is he simply there to entertain himself or is this a performance for the viewer? It eventually goes terribly wrong when he quite literally drowns in his own ego.
Meet Montreal's Mambo Drag Kings, a dapper group of lip synching lesbians who entertain in style.
A short film on the subject of Indigenous Love. What is (romantic) love? And what does it mean to you? 8 couples share their thoughts
A spoken word poem and minimalist audio track about a sexy highland stream, a love letter to the beauty found in nature, and the mysterious way beauty is suffused in the natural world, written in English and Anishinaabemowin.
There are many memories of childhood that have slipped through the cracks. Most that I can recollect were of the differences in myself in comparison to the others around. Taken away at one week of age from my Indian community and given to a white foster family, my experience of the authentic Indian and where my placement is, within this dream of authenticity, comes from an infected locale.
a Tribute to Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWGs)
As they get ready for the day, three young Black women discuss the public perception of their Blackness in relation to their cultivation of a strong sense of self. Wash Day is an intimate exploration into how private, domestic acts such as washing your hair or putting on makeup become a significant re-acquaintance with the body, before and after navigating the politics of one's outwardly appearance.
This work deals with the idea of sacred and profane and the Catholicism as an instrument of colonization.
Maiden Indian follows three women on a journey from the mall toward a deeper understanding of self.
Transformed into a salmon, an Indigenous street artist travels through decayed urban landscapes to the forests of long ago, in this sublime mixed animation.
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?
Treaty X features an audio track and a layering of composited video footage with themes of connection/disconnection to land and waters, treaty rights, and the way capitalism monetizes nature. The Treaty #3 territory comprises 55,000 hectares of land, and annuity payments of $5 have never been adjusted for inflation.
Hoop Dancers is a silent video featuring four young men in powwow regalia playing pick-up basketball.
The artist ponders the possibilities of reconciliation.
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.