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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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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.
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.
Spirit Bear's friends teach him about residential schools and how he can help with reconciliation!
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.
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.
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.
A female firefighter takes her daughter along for a day on the job.
Clash of cultures, care of the elderly and four women trying to make sense of their unravelling family, this is Mum Singh.
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.
As he is making a didgeridoo, Bernard Bosa tells us what vibration is for him, what it has done in his life.
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: CENSORSHIP dossier. The envelope and folders are opened and the contents examined.
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 young loner struggles to make connection at a haunted summer camp.
The VUCAVU team is growing: we welcome Yvette Sin, in the position of Digital Education Programming Assistant at VUCAVU. Yvette Sin is an interdisciplinary artist, filmmaker, and bookseller based in Toronto. Her award-winning short films have screened internationally, including at the National Film Festival for Talented Youth and TIFF Next Wave...
We are thrilled to announce that Axelle Demus has been hired as VUCAVU’s Educational Sector Outreach Consultant. Axelle is a FOCAS (Faculty Organizing for Community Archives Support) postdoctoral fellow at McGill University’s School of Information Studies (archivalfocas.org)....
Nicole plays with and counts five buds from a shrub on a miniature stage.
This is a documentary which treats the subject in terms of work, performance and sexuality. In striptease as in dominant cinema, women are presented as sexual spectacle, silent objects to be looked at. This film presents the dancers as speaking subjects, constructing a job profile from the point of view of the women who do the work.
Le film documentaire trace le portrait d'une jeune femme, Angèle, ayant décidé de partir seule explorer les routes des États-Unis.
Filmed within a chain hotel’s Roman Theme Room, this video features a weeping woman having a bubble-bath and emotionally eating chocolates.
"Cave Small Cave Big" is a magical and surreal short film written by five-year-olds Madeline Harker and Adelaide Schwartz.
A five-foot, six-inch rappin’ vulva, in an unexpected parody of the music video genre, leads the viewer on a complete description of female genitalia.
Based on actual diary entries made between 1937 and 1945 by Mrs. Kathleen Clews from Amulet Saskatchewan (now a ghost town), this film explores the beautiful and lonely yearning elicited in the filmmaker by the many lost stories in the province's history.
A portrait of visual artist Rebecca Belmore.
3 groups of 3 young women of different ages (sixteen, nineteen and twenty one years old) question their relation towards femininity and the socially constructed notion of gender that stifles them.
Iron filings and magnets become tools of divination as a dowser conducts a site reading of a drill cuttings sample from an abandoned oil well in Alberta, Canada.
The primo tourist spot, Coney Island, as seen by a wandering heart.
What do we bring with us from our homeland that remains in our possession? What do we discard? What do we pass on? Language, memories, objects that bear witness to past lives and often, to other cultures...
A spoken word poem about Indigenous issues from the perspective of three different Native women.
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.
Video collage that approaches memory and how we remember, by overlaying images and sound, to create a disorienting moment in time.
Profiling the affects the Albertan oil fields have on the Indigenous communities nearby.
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.
Spirit Bear tells a tragic story of Jordan River Anderson, and unfairness towards Indigenous Kids.
A journalist gets more than bargained for while interviewing a strange local on recent disappearances.
A film about the annual gathering at South Indian Lake, Manitoba.
Set to music by Little Hawk, this animated and starkly honest story is a daughter’s tribute to her estranged mother.
milkteeth is an investigation into the imperfection of memory and attempts at preserving the ephemeral.
Fleeting Encounters
Métis, Métis Not is a video documentation of the filmmaker’s lack of relationship with her cultural background
A pop explosion of Ukranian delight that will leave you bedazzled. Are you ready?
A meditation on mortality, mediated by a lifetime's compendium of images.
A non-linear narrative about women, witches and contemporary reclaiming of women’s spirituality.
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.
"This film is available in French only. Use the Search or Explore site tools to select non-dialogue or English-language films and videos." In 1970, Hungarian-Québécois photographer Gabor Szilasi set out for the Charlevoix region of Québec to photograph the last vestiges of a disappearing rural world.
A woman transforms into Louis Riel in an exploration of Métis identity.
Hoop Dancers is a silent video featuring four young men in powwow regalia playing pick-up basketball.
Welcome to the French District of Florida, Snowbird’s paradise.
Who is up there? Who is at the top? This endeavor to move from one place to another was influenced by Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” in which a character travels through an unknown landscape.
"La vie en pellicule" is film about a promise I made my son at his birth. He was born at the end of the year 2006 when negatives of family snapshots and precious moments are rare. I promised him that he would grow up with negatives as records of our lives.
In three parallel worlds, two lovers meet, lust, disappoint and drink coffee and it's time for the cycle to change.
Other Half Dating Service, the artist references dating videos from the 1980’s where individuals would discuss the type of partner that they were looking for.
Since the launch of the VUCAVU platform in 2016, we have collaborated with artists, educators, and arts organizations across the country to present a wide variety of independent Canadian films and video art online. Artists are always compensated for the dissemination of their works, and the artworks can often be rented individually for VOD viewing after the programming free period has expired. Programs are always accompanied by bilingual curatorial texts exploring the themes addressed in the selection, and many of them also include recordings of roundtable discussions and conversations with the artists!
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.