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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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VUCAVU is delighted to launch three new programs in the Educational Guide series from Archive/Counter-Archive (A/CA); 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.
Our payment processing company has informed us that the online form employed to add a site users' payment info to their VUCAVU Rental Account will stop functioning on February 28th, 2025. The estimated cost to fix this form is prohibitive pricey. While we weigh our options and look for funding to mitigate the change, for now, this form will be allowed to lapse.
Fanny meets her high school friends for the annual Switch & Bitch Party.
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.
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: PORN Dossier. The envelope and folders are opened and the contents examined.
"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.
As he is making a didgeridoo, Bernard Bosa tells us what vibration is for him, what it has done in his life.
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.
Spirit Bear's friends teach him about residential schools and how he can help with reconciliation!
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.
Clash of cultures, care of the elderly and four women trying to make sense of their unravelling family, this is Mum Singh.
A young loner struggles to make connection at a haunted summer camp.
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 presentation for filmmakers and artists with VUCAVU.com’s Digital Programming Intern, Stephanie Poruchnyk-Butler.
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.
Two sisters attempt to find common understanding amidst bickering.
Is Ohio the fish or the phisher? The film’s sexual metaphor extends to artists, who use their own experiences as material for their work, becoming both fish and fisher, harvester and harvested. Ohio’s deeply personal documentary footage and audio recordings serve as the raw material for her exploration of class, art, and the performance of heterosexuality.
She Draws a Circle reflects on the work of generations of women to interrupt cycles of violence and oppression, looking to the ways in which our spiritual connections to the land and one another help us to hold space for regenerative healing, bringing the hidden to light drawing on that light to encircle each successive generation.
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!
An experimental short exploring the tenuous grasp the promises we make have on our lives.
A deathbed tale. A skeptical daughter. A genealogical goose chase to the remote Icelandic highland.
A look at the mysterious and often misunderstood world of Hutterites in Manitoba.
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.
This journey led to the creation of a 30 minute documentary film in which Henteleff presents a personal, point-of-view account of the Taharah beginning in the Jewish mortuary and ending at the moment of burial.
Set to music by Little Hawk, this animated and starkly honest story is a daughter’s tribute to her estranged mother.
A story of an elderly woman who puts on her jewelry. Each treasured piece brings a reminder of the life she once had, filled with ballet, love, freedom and joy. Her current reality fades and she is renewed in the world of her past.
A manuscript, written in 1954 to aid missionaries working among the Cree speaking natives of northern Saskatchewan, Canada, is the basis for this reflective narrative.
A personal film, providing an intimate look at family and tradition through the making of fish soup.
Hoop Dancers is a silent video featuring four young men in powwow regalia playing pick-up basketball.
A short documentary film that follows four young gay men as they discuss gay life and sexual health in Montreal.
An experimental documentary that explores the complicated process of decolonization and reveals how our memory and history are ingrained in our sense of identification.
Waking up after thousands of years of being encased in ice, the voice of a creature is heard, emerging to find that the world is a much different place, although some things remain the same, he is hungry, and he is still an Apex predator, at the top of the food chain. The soundtrack is composed of samples of audio from the largest mass calving event in recorded history (when arctic ice melts and collapses into the ocean). There's a new monster in town.
"ôtênaw" is a film documenting the oral storytelling of Dwayne Donald, an educator from Treaty 6, Edmonton Canada. Drawing from nêhiyawak philosophies, he speaks about the multilayered histories of Indigenous peoples’ presence both within and around amiskwacîwâskahikan, or what has come to be known as the city of Edmonton.
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."
Brown Town Muddy Water is a documentary about the Indigenous Musicians that lived, died, prospered and survived Winnipeg's notorious main street strip during the 1960’s.
Mikomiing is an Anishinaabe word for 'on the frozen water' a term often used when a commercial fisherman has gone out to check his nets. This documentary follows a day in the life of a fisherman in the First Nation community of Little Saskatchewan, Manitoba.
Five lifelong friends. Four are fearful of their future. One must face the fact that she may not have one.
A look at how the community of Lake St. Martin First Nation was destroyed and displaced by water management policy.
An experimental video meditation exploring the artist’s position and placement in white culture. Continuing his search for identity within a fractured cultural environment, the artist reflects on his history of dislocation and negotiates with the boundaries that include aspects from within both the dominate White society and First Nations history and culture.
Imagine a place smaller in size than Quebec, along the shores of the Mediterranean, where more than 19 religious communities live together. Imagine that some people, in spite of a tormented history, have found the strength and the wisdom not to yield to sectarianism.
Fleeting Encounters
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.
A portrait of visual artist Rebecca Belmore.
An irreverent commercial for a fictitious diet program.
Quel est ton paradis ?...
Busy Napping imagines sleep being embodied in and behaving like wax and examines this idea in extreme close up. In this scenario, waking up creates a mess that needs to be addressed using laundry tips for getting wax out of linens.
In Crystal Skin provides a glimpse into the lives of four individuals living with the same rare disease in Bogotá, Colombia.
Taekwondo first emerged as a martial art in Korea in the 1950s. Today, it is taught worldwide as shown here in a elementary school gymnasium in Montreal.
A dance of hope.
A woman attempts to pull herself out of her sinking mood by taking a bath.
Commentaire corporel, visuel et sonore sur l’accélération du rythme de vie et sur notre devoir d’être sans cesse performants, actifs et productifs.
"Un jour au camp Francosurvie" is a documentary that follows a group of youths (18-24) during their time at a French language summer camp in Maskwa Manitoba.
“HANDTINTING is the apt title of a film made from outtakes from a Job Corps documentary which features hand-tinted sections. The film is full of small movements and actions, gestures begun and never completed. Repeated images, sometimes in colour, sometimes not.