We're sorry, but our site requires Javascript to be enabled. If you would like instructions on how to enable Javascript, please click here.
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.
What is MY LIST?
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’s Digital Collections Assistant will perform tasks associated with bilingual communications, marketing, web content management, and other administrative tasks as needed. ** VUCAVU acknowledges the Government of Canada's Canada Summer Jobs program for their support of this position.
We are proud to announce the launch of Desire Lines: Experimental Video as Social and Spatial Interventions in the GIV Collection. This bilingual educational guide was produced as part of the Through Feminist Lenses: Video Works at Groupe Intervention Vidéo Case Study, and is a collaboration between A/CA, Groupe Intervention Video (GIV), the Moving Image Research Lab (MIRL) at McGill, and VUCAVU. .
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.
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.
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 presentation for filmmakers and artists with VUCAVU.com’s Digital Programming Intern, Stephanie Poruchnyk-Butler.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
A young loner struggles to make connection at a haunted summer camp.
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.
As he is making a didgeridoo, Bernard Bosa tells us what vibration is for him, what it has done in his life.
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.
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.
The Complete Book of Roses—pages 1–114. A brief glimpse of the disconnect between digital devices and recording the “natural.” Made during Video Pool’s Media Arts Residency (2019-2020) using the Apollo monitor and microscope camera.
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!
Short descriptionThe conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan as seen through the eyes of the inhabitants of the Caucasus.
Part of the ongoing “Supa” series, Supa Stition is a glimpse into the unseen world of magic and the occult.
Boyer reflects on her family’s displacement from the Souris Valley (now McDonald Lake) by way of the construction of the Rafferty Dam in 1988. In the two-channel video installation, Boyer canoes out to the original location of her family’s farm and the Souris Valley Métis community, now submerged at the bottom of the lake, and in a playful and contemplative gesture, swims the site.
This video interrogates how subjectivities, political stances, and modes of social engagement formed elsewhere contribute to our positioning within the local, cultural landscape of Vancouver.
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 constructed cinematic space where life and death exist.
This documentary of the artist's father is in Cantonese with English subtitles. The visual image is expressed by a technique called stop-motion painting where each stroke is recorded for 2 to 3 seconds. The footage is sped up to create a fluid painting motion. Documentary of My Father is about Lam's father before she knew him personally, before she was born.
"Beneath the Earth" marks the first in a series of works investigating the language of dreams and the cycles of life. Following the birth of her daughter, the artist addresses her fears and anxiety as a parent with a new found sense of mortality.
"The Way We Are" shares excerpts of stories from audio interviews with 4 queer Asian women living in Toronto: Katherine Chun, Wenda Li, Tamai Kobayashi, and Nancy Seto. Told in the present-tense, these stories are arranged in a way that explores the past as the present, and in doing so, immersing viewers into the real-lived experiences from a different generation.
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.
"A re-creation of my journey to the sweat lodge ceremony through sound image and narration."
A film about the annual gathering at South Indian Lake, Manitoba.
An experimental documentary that explores the complicated process of decolonization and reveals how our memory and history are ingrained in our sense of identification.
Hand-drawn illustrations animate this touching personal story about the "60’s Scoop” of Aboriginal children into the Canadian child-welfare system.
The fear of bridges.
The story of a man lost in the Arctic during a blizzard and his mysterious rescuer
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.
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.
Cuthand uses a latent gas mask fetish as a jumping off point for looking at their role as a participant in the Whitney Biennial during a contentious year for the museum which had a war profiteer on the board.
Filmmaker Coleen Rajotte returns to Pikangikum First Nation in northwestern Ontario, a community with an unusually high suicide rate.
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.
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.
"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.
Alone on the road, they pursue highly eclectic musical paths. How did they end up writing, playing and touring solo?
"Remote Sensing" is an exploration of the canon of sensations. The video pushes the limits of sensation and defines the detached way we gather information and adapt to fresh information. Or rather, how we react to over-stimulation.
The body in the techno craze? The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency? Biopiracy and indigeneity? Military Robotics? Trafficking of women over the internet? E-Waste? Autobiographical and contemporary, this interpretation of the delusions and illusions of the technocultural era delivers us Out, Into This World….
Sandra is a young woman ready for anything to be loved by someone, anyone.
Passed on and denied from generation to generation, spousal abuse is rarely treated from the point of view of the abuser.
The artist organizes the tension between video-painting-body, by displacing the traditional pictorial support (the canvas) to the body as the zone of intervention. The body is naked, the body is painted.
This film is available in French only.
An experimental short exploring the tenuous grasp the promises we make have on our lives.
Le film documentaire trace le portrait d'une jeune femme, Angèle, ayant décidé de partir seule explorer les routes des États-Unis.
2 B is part of the AVATAR series exploring methods of creating, validating and disseminating one’s identity through the use of technology and the Internet.
Only by looking back, there is an understanding of finding yourself on a moon-like space.