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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Amidst a biodiverse wasteland on the brink of being enveloped by encroaching bitumen, the enigmatic Beast of the Earth materializes in a prophetic dance.
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.
A female firefighter takes her daughter along for a day on the job.
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.
A presentation for filmmakers and artists with VUCAVU.com’s Digital Programming Intern, Stephanie Poruchnyk-Butler.
"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 young loner struggles to make connection at a haunted summer camp.
Two sisters attempt to find common understanding amidst bickering.
After 15 years of living in Montréal, Hind returns to Morocco, her country of origin.
A young trans man notices himself, becomes transfixed with his image and starts flirting leading up to a tentative, yet hot kiss.
Temporary Tattoos applied to 35mm for eternity. An energetic conjuring of Manitoban spirits. Starring: Haunted HyperActive Hypnotists and Breakneck Butterfly Barfbags.
A series of shorts films about a group of talented, passionate and brave women who make their voices heard though the art of graffiti.
Pierre is a Montreal born belly dancer of Syrian origin. Belly dance is an art that is mainly performed by women, but men also have a role in the history of this dance. This short documentary presents Pierre’s story as well as...
Dance is an art form and the women of Nova Dance Collective struggle to make their art and be heard in a tough Winnipeg market.
Invasive behaviours accumulate on the surface of water bodies and on the film itself.
An Iranian vocalist struggles to make her voice heard in a country where female singers are banned.
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.
BGCP I and BGCP II works, are created as a video diptych. Each is a performance for the camera where the grotesque character that is a double of a Pinocchio doll. The Pinocchio doll is assembled and disassembled in a futile and absurd labor.
A meditation on (im)mortality, mediated by a lifetime of images
VUCAVU Showreel
A devil makes a violent attempt to change himself into a heavenly creature.
Based on stories my grandmother told me, I re-imagine while working as a cleaner the experiences of my ancestors during the Holodomor (forced famine) in Ukraine during the Stalinist-Soviet era.
A master brings out his slave and attempts to control him.
"In this quintessential 'coming out' film, a grinding rhythm leads us through a passage of closed doors, as a man struggles to break free from his literal and social confinement." - Images Festival of Independent Film & Video catalogue, 1995
Récit ironique d'un corps qui a perdu toute maîtrise sur son visage...
No Safe Words was created at the UBC Thunder Stadium to be broadcast on a JumboTron screen during Toronto’s 2008 Pride Parade and festivities.
Vi-a lesbian and artist-is heartbroken after her lover, Charlie, leaves her. She spends her days and sleepless nights in Charlie's pyjamas, alternately painting her “inner storm cloud” and abstract images of vaginas. These are strewn about her home amid other signs of her unraveling life.
In this utterly endearing animation by Iris Moore, a couple gets to know themselves and each other by exchanging their eyes, genitalia and facial features with different ones.
A powerful and intensely moving document of a community vigil for Islan Nettles, a transgender Womyn of Colour, concerning her spirit and life.
Compiled with images of storefronts of beauty parlors and barber shops from Chinatown and the Lower East Side on New York City, the video takes the viewer into the almost mythical hair culture of the local community. Accompanied by a soundtrack of "Heart Sutra" chanting from a Buddhist monastery, "Hair Cuts" explores the interior of human hearts through the architectural mapping of sites seen.
Originally a multichannel video installation at the Royal Ontario Museum, Archaeology and You contemplates fallen empires, language and the motivating power of fear.
Whitewash examines slavery in Canada and its omission from the national narrative. The country prides itself as being the benevolent refuge where enslaved Africans who were brought to United States gained their freedom via the Underground Railroad. That powerful image overshadows the fact that slavery was legal in Canada for over 200 years under both French and British rule.
High Altitude explores what it means to be an Indigenous artist in the modern world.
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.
A group of Vietnamese nationals is making their way to an unknown location in a shipping container to find a better life.
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?
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 split-screen video of the Trans-Canada Highway and the single Access Road on our Reserve, the Lac des Mille Lacs First Nation / Nezaatiikang, located north-west of Thunder Bay. Before the completion of the Access road in the late 2000's, the Reserve was only accessible by water. The roads work as metaphor of Colonization by revealing disparity between Canada and Indigenous Nations.
Grand Chief Sheila North investigates unsolved murder of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls.
still is part of an ongoing body of work that addresses the persistence of colonial structures in contemporary Canada through a critical white settler lens. These works confront facets of this overarching concern through a practice of performing interventions into the land/scape and tampering with iconic elements of Canadian visual culture. Integrating the residue of an off-camera performance within a quintessentially ‘Canadian’ landscape as a politically, culturally and historically mitigated r
This film is available in French only.
An experimental documentary that explores the complicated process of decolonization and reveals how our memory and history are ingrained in our sense of identification.
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.