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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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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.
As he is making a didgeridoo, Bernard Bosa tells us what vibration is for him, what it has done in his life.
Spirit Bear's friends teach him about residential schools and how he can help with reconciliation!
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.
Two sisters attempt to find common understanding amidst bickering.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
A young loner struggles to make connection at a haunted summer camp.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
The re-imagination of the generational passage of traditional knowledge between a woman and her grandmother moon.
"The Magus" is a multi-format, process-based experimental film that explores the root of artistic creation.
On a hill, a girl re-imagines her journey of survival. Spoken word and layered visuals create an intense urban tale of personal transformation.
The video explores gay Asian men's (GAMs) cruising strategies on American gay sex hookup websites.
The youngest of 17 children, the filmmaker presents us with an intimate family portrait in 17 rolls of Super 8.
Can’t Help Falling in Love with You follows Laura Ohio documenting Los Angeles through the dual lens of artist and sex worker. The film reveals the production of emotional experiences and the radical intimacy in which “artists and prostitutes are compelled to connect with complete strangers: a public. They share themselves with everyone but no one in particular” (Baudelaire).
Within the mystical spaces of a Judaic self-doubt, falls a dreaming painter from the fallen Polish city of Lodz.
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.
An experimental short exploring the absences and buried histories that follow the act of leaving home, filtered through the many routes that leaving home takes for a "Canadien" daughter of Yugoslav immigrants: cultural displacement, assimilation, mother/daughter histories, sexuality and memory.
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.
The fear of bridges.
A woman daydreams in the Winnipeg winter, and discovers the Don Juan within. Don Juan, as a woman, gives us glimpses of her life with a collection of cross-dressers, unlikely saints and martyrs. Don Juan becomes a martyr for women’s pleasure. Actors in this video are Shawna Dempsey, Lorri Millan, Rebecca Popoff, Erika MacPherson and Lori Weidenhammer.
A video collage based on twenty-eight tracking shots of city scenes.
Numb, questions Kanata’s relationship with Indigenous peoples, allowing the viewer to contemplate the next 150 year relationship.
A collaboration between partners Theo Pelmus and Kris Snowbird, who is Ojibwa and Cree, put themselves in a gesture conversation about their link as a couple coming from different cultural backgrounds.
Exploring the legacy of the Indian Residential School system by looking at its history, present conditions and hopes for the future.
September 2013. The Court ruling is reached. Almost a quarter million Dominicans of Haitian descent have just become stateless because of the Dominican Constitutional Tribunal’s decision.
Gerry Barret: The Original Aboriginal takes us from studio interview to the stage at Rumor’s Comedy Club and the Cat Sass Tavern. Gerry’s repertoire includes topics like: what should an Indian D.J. sound like on the radio?... A day in the life of Canada’s first native prime minister... a ballad to Elijah Harper and much more, including a stop at a movie shoot.
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.
Everyone sees. No one tells.
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.
This collaborative work was made by Jaylene and Winona along with their mentor Jackie Traverse as an experimentation for their first film.
An eight year old girl experience a series of traumatic events while quarantined in the infirmary of a residential school for Native children in Canada.
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.
"Parallax is the apparent change in position of an object resulting from the change in direction or position from which it is viewed." Confusion, underlying meaning, and unspoken truths are often associated with the dialectic of sexual communication. Mingled with the intensity and unpredictability of a “one night stand,” they generate unique sensations - mixed emotion, risk, excitement.
A traveller on the metro finds herself in a state of suspension while transferring between stations. Personal security and freedom of movement vie for private space in a public place.
A lyrical meditation on moon cycles and the female body
Afro hair goes Beyond Curls & Kinks
In this selfie-style video, the artist discusses the type of person that she imagines herself being with.
Strange dreamy landscapes hides emotional moods and states of transitions through thick textures and VHS glitches.
During a family party, Myriam, a six years old girl, suffers from her parents bad temper regarding an accident with horrific consequences that she may had cause.
Constructed with repetitions and variations in reference to the musical form of a nocturne, Far From is an accumulation of the layers, density and noise of existence. The film evokes the ghosts of lives lived and the traces of lives being lived, rising.
A ritual of grief and expiation, "August" looks to the sky as a means to connect to the infinity of creation and the source of awareness. Mystics believe that the awareness of this unity may be sufficient to carry us through our most difficult times. The artist reflects on her past as she contemplates her impending mortality.
Passed on and denied from generation to generation, spousal abuse is rarely treated from the point of view of the abuser.
This 4 part series examines the changing roles of women in post-war British Columbia. Part 1 examines the 1940s.