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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.
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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.
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.
Spirit Bear's friends teach him about residential schools and how he can help with reconciliation!
"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 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.
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.
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.
Clash of cultures, care of the elderly and four women trying to make sense of their unravelling family, this is Mum Singh.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A young loner struggles to make connection at a haunted summer camp.
Water bodies grow restless as they awaken from winter’s deep freeze.
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!
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.
A hard-hitting work that, to paraphrase Jean Genet, gives a voice to the unexpressed.
A constructed cinematic space where life and death exist.
With lyrics by Nishnaabeg poet Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, How to Steal a Canoe tells the story of a young Nishnaabeg woman and an old Nishnaabeg man rescuing a canoe from a museum and returning it to the lake where it was meant to be.
From the heart of the planet’s slums and squats, individuals have taken over these marginalized worlds and erected cities in their own image.
'Undone' explores the troubled language of the tactile body.
This is a film that touches on my thoughts about growing up. I wanted to use things that I think we're appealing to my eye.
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.
« Collage » des images publicitaires du « féminin ». L'enchaînement des images déconstruit le modèle irréel de la femme que la publicité véhicule dans les revues « féminines » et dans les annonces télévisées.
A displaced young girl, her overwhelmed older sister and the superhero that brings them together.
Don’t Blink For 45 Seconds (After Kathy Dillon) is a 45 second performative video work addressing the thresholds and limitations of the body in relation to control.
Picariello and Lassandro investigates the real-life story of Filumena “Florence” Lassandro and Emilio Picariello, Italian immigrants who were convicted and hanged in 1923 for the murder of an Alberta Provincial Police officer.
In an Algeria divided between tradition and modernity, two young adults named Karim and Hadjer could not love each other free.
Video collage that approaches memory and how we remember, by overlaying images and sound, to create a disorienting moment in time.
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.
A lively look at the lives and musical roots of Aboriginal women from across North America.
"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.
A young mother looks to connect with her Aboriginal culture in order to teach her children.
"A re-creation of my journey to the sweat lodge ceremony through sound image and narration."
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.
Home deals with the conflicting worlds of Aboriginal people, the view of the urban Aboriginal and the view of the rural Aboriginal.
Burning an Effigy considers intergenerational legacies of the Indian residential schools, the colonial presence, and its persistent impacts on community.
Half-breed Alice attempts to become queen and struggles with the Red Queen and the White Queen's disapproval of her racial transgressions. A funny and quirky take on race, this piece stars Cosmosquaw as the Red Queen, Shawna Dempsey as the White Queen, and Thirza Cuthand as Alice.
After his family's untimely demise in 1945, George Bassler bizarrely crafts a perpetual motion machine.
“This work is an interaction of the space, the symbols and the historical context in which I live as a woman on this side of the continent. It is a rosary of alarm, eternal and circular; the alarm of a woman who desires life, light, truth, and solidarity, but who instead sees and receives death and fear. It is a rejection of all that is destruction, and death, yet is depicted almost attractively as innocence.” - Gloria Camiruaga
"Lies, Lies, Lies" reflects the artist’s ongoing interest in 'found footage', sharp editing and computer manipulation of images to create work that is often funny but also bites.
In the single-channel video "Hybred", artist Christine Kirouac translates a conversation with her mother into an exploration of the stereotypes and subjectivities surrounding her Métis identity (Cree/Irish).
“Perdere: to lose, to waste, to destroy” explores the rapidly deteriorating landscapes surrounding Tuktoyaktuk, NT along Canada’s northwest coast. Through contemplative drone footage and a soundscape using hydrophone and natural soundscape recordings, this work bears witness to the tragic effects of climate change along the shores of the Beaufort Sea.
“Betty Ferguson's ‘Kisses,’ an hour-long anthology of film clips presented without titles or voiceover, is the sweetest and, in avant-garde terms, the most conventional film on the program.
We need this. So look for the good and ignore the rest.
Ties that bind beyond the last light.
Agenda follows clues to a mysterious woman and her continuous re-invention.
A woman deals with the death of her mother through self-annihilating tendencies.
In their familiar, humorous style, Millan and Dempsey explore the elements of passionate lesbian love. A woman stands in isolation, clad in a paper ball gown that is both fragile and stiff. On it, and on her environment, are reflected projections of her desire and its denial.
This paint on glass animation tells this dark tale of a soldier who returns home from war to find his girlfriend has left him.
Montreal based chef with Mauritanian origins is missing the main ingredient of his delicious recipes: the desert salt. He crosses the desert annually...