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.
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.
A presentation for filmmakers and artists with VUCAVU.com’s Digital Programming Intern, Stephanie Poruchnyk-Butler.
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 young loner struggles to make connection at a haunted summer camp.
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.
Clash of cultures, care of the elderly and four women trying to make sense of their unravelling family, this is Mum Singh.
As he is making a didgeridoo, Bernard Bosa tells us what vibration is for him, what it has done in his life.
"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.
Two sisters attempt to find common understanding amidst bickering.
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.
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.
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: PORN Dossier. The envelope and folders are opened and the contents examined.
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.
Spirit Bear's friends teach him about residential schools and how he can help with reconciliation!
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).
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!
Out on the open prairie, how could you possibly feel hemmed in? Through the dialogue between a bird and a woman, the story of a woman’s situation and love relationship unfolds. As it does, so does the issue gossip as a tool of conformity to a community’s morals, expectations and the idea that truth is a very delicate and disposable item. This is all approached with a good sense of humour - the lighter something tastes, the more of it you can eat.
“The Script” presents a collage of revealing moments pulled from material in the Prelinger Archives, an online collection of over 11,000 "ephemeral" (advertising, educational, industrial and amateur) films made between the 1910s – 1980s.
A couple of uber-goths ride the public transit to the mall to buy more lipstick, but the subtext! Pain, suffering and eternal damnation wrapped in velvety angst. It’s sunny outside, but dark in their souls!
A veritable aesthetic fresco blending portrait, political documentary and experimental cinema, Miron : a man returned from outside the world recounts the people of Quebec’s collective journey through the work of their greatest poet, Gaston Miron.
A distinct world – that is often an isolated part of a larger world – is viscerally envisioned in this uniquely hand- processed film.
Numb, questions Kanata’s relationship with Indigenous peoples, allowing the viewer to contemplate the next 150 year relationship.
In the stories of adoption, the mothers who gave birth were invisible. Exiled Mothers takes us on the artist Sharon Alward’s journey to recover her own repressed, secret, shaming memories from relinquishing her daughter in 1971.
Two ersatz “Indian warriors” chase a beautiful Indian maiden through the streets of Winnipeg but she loves Chief Big Bear. Who is the hunter, and who the hunted in this tableaux?
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.
Selling the Flamingo looks at memory and sentiment through the liquidation of one of Winnipeg’s premiere landmarks, the Flamingo Motel.
Six teenagers go through their first emotional flutters. Boy-girl relationships, friendship, first love butterflies in the stomach, body changes, sexuality… Why is everything so complicated?
An Ojibwe boy falls in love with Grandfather Sun, and recites an Anishinaabe language morning prayer with a few slight alterations. Thank you Grandfather. Miigwetch Nshoomis. I love the feel of your light on my skin. Gotta love that Vitamin D. The language used in this piece is Anishinaabe/Ojibwe.
A resourceful young Métis man comes to the rescue of family, friends and strangers in this amusing short film.
Canadian Time 2 builds upon a 2006 Kirouac performance underwent at the Rijksakademie (Netherlands) where she painted time signatures on the wall in the hours awaiting the results of her program eligibility. In 2011, she translates a similar, yet more pronounced set of circumstances in a performance executed at the Receiver Festival in Charleston, SC. Alluding to the twelve-hour drive from her home in North Carolina to the Canadian border, she marries painting and tragi-comic theatre in a perfor
The story of a man lost in the Arctic during a blizzard and his mysterious rescuer
A woman transforms into Louis Riel in an exploration of Métis identity.
Shot on Bolex, and hand-processed, the short film documents the steps of creating an oil painting. Narrated by rural Manitoba artist Vivian Paschke.
A spoken word poem about Indigenous issues from the perspective of three different Native women.
Métis Femme Bodies returns the narratives to those who have had their voices muted and cultures stolen from them.
After years of repression, an old woman's common sense goes head-to-head with the fantastic imagination of her inner child, who yearns to be free.
Hoop Dancers is a silent video featuring four young men in powwow regalia playing pick-up basketball.
The re-imagination of the generational passage of traditional knowledge between a woman and her grandmother moon.
A 70s TV sitcom set around a young group of artists.
Cette vidéo relève plusieurs facteurs qui déterminent l'accès à l'information sur le sida au Mali, ainsi que les conditions qui influencent la diffusion de cette information auprès des femmes maliennes.
Filmmaker Coleen Rajotte returns to Pikangikum First Nation in northwestern Ontario, a community with an unusually high suicide rate.
A visual delight, this film by one of Winnipeg's most talented photographers explores a field of sunflowers, examining details of the large beaming heads, waving leaves, and bowing stalks, all to the music of Bill Hinkley.
Victoria, a young actress full of dreams, carefully prepares for an audition. She's to play a character with no name: Whore No. 2. However, the casting director turns her expectations sideways.
The house that bursts; the scene of the crime; the nucleus. A universe collapses on itself: all hell breaks loose.
This atmospheric short film alludes to a catastrophic event that has left two women grief-stricken and isolated in a barren snow-covered wilderness.
Follow Jackie through the 1960s Toronto Yonge Street music scene, the tabloid rumours and scandals, to the mysterious disappearance. What ever happened to Jackie Shane? You have to watch to find out.
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 hypothetical nuclear fallout, eerily bringing antique military equipment, uniforms and other objects to life with stop-motion.
That formidable force of conservation officials, Lesbian National Parks and Services, presents three portraits of lesbian species in crisis. Not unlike the renowned 1970s Hinterlands Who's-Who series, these public service announcements point to the perils of habitat loss and poaching. The Marxist Feminist, the Lesbian Separatist and the Bull-Dykus Americanus are featured in this parody of nature education.
Manhattan Project Revisited" is a digital reconstruction of the Manhattan Project, where the first atomic bomb was created during the Second World War. This artwork recreates critical structures from its three main sites: Los Alamos - New Mexico, Oak Ridge - Tennessee, and Hanford - Washington.
Un jour, à Belfast, en apprenant la mort d'un prisonnier, des femmes en colère se sont réunies sur la place. Et là, un couvercle de poubelle à la main, elles ont martelé le sol pour souligner le triste courage de ce neuvième gréviste de la faim à mourir en silence.