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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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A young loner struggles to make connection at a haunted summer camp.
A female firefighter takes her daughter along for a day on the job.
Spirit Bear's friends teach him about residential schools and how he can help with reconciliation!
Clash of cultures, care of the elderly and four women trying to make sense of their unravelling family, this is Mum Singh.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)....
“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.
This work is a fantasy of freedom, in which a stroll in the park gives rise to an opening up of unstable sexual codes, shifting identities and the empowering game of come and go.
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.
A young woman enters a crisis on the eve of her 19th birthday as she realizes she is about to out-age her older sister who died at 18.
"Francophone-hybride" is a short documentary that was shot in Winnipeg during the Festival du voyageur, an annual winter festival which celebrates Manitoba’s Metis, Francophone and First Nations heritage.
Built around an improvised exploration, this video piece presents two subjects engaging their senses.
“HANDTINTING is the apt title of a film made from outtakes from a Job Corps documentary which features hand-tinted sections. The film is full of small movements and actions, gestures begun and never completed. Repeated images, sometimes in colour, sometimes not.
North America's obsession with thinness, dieting and weight loss has deeply affected a generation of women who spend countless hours punishing themselves physically and emotionally for failing to reach the impossibly thin standard that the media confronts them with daily. This videotape by Jane Kubke takes the audience into the ascetic daily ritual of calorie burning ...
Meteors and lunar rocks seen through a microscope slowly morph into an interstellar landscape.
Her anger is like a fever.
Chaos at its best, at an uncontrolled intersection in Hanoi.
Using anonymous home movie footage of Expo ’67 in Montreal, the artist sets out to recreate a memory that perhaps never existed.
A Johannesburg neighourhood unites five people’s ambitions, desires, and struggles to survive over the course of a Friday.
When Land and Body Merge began with the artists and curator meeting online, and over a two month period creating work through video and writing that allowed them to connect and build a relationship from afar. They worked with the idea of a call and response with Lindsay creating work, and Jaime responding to it, and vice versa.
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.
An experimental documentary that explores the complicated process of decolonization and reveals how our memory and history are ingrained in our sense of identification.
Everyone sees. No one tells.
A resourceful young Métis man comes to the rescue of family, friends and strangers in this amusing short film.
After his family's untimely demise in 1945, George Bassler bizarrely crafts a perpetual motion machine.
A film crew journeys to resurrect a lost film, taking it to the communities where the film was originally shot. Images come to life; people recognize faces, landscapes, and lost traditions.
An inside look at how one jingle dress dancer physically and mentally prepares for competition pow-wows.
When Marc Roger, a public reader, sets himself the challenge of walking from Saint-Malo, France, to Bamako, Mali, along with a donkey laden with books to be read aloud, filmmaker Catherine Hébert (The Other Side of the Country) joins him in Morocco, her camera rolling."
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?
A portrait of visual artist Rebecca Belmore.
‘Video Home System’ traces the convergence of popular culture and politics in Pakistan during the 1980s and 1990s. This video showcases the connections between pop culture and nationalism, and how bootleg economies kept the cinema industry alive during periods of censorship.
Produced for Much Music’s Word Up program, "What Does a Lesbian Look Like?" examines a plethora of big dyke stereotypes and embraces them. Performed by Shawna Dempsey and a whole whack of gals. Created by Dempsey and Millan.
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?
Set to music by Little Hawk, this animated and starkly honest story is a daughter’s tribute to her estranged mother.
This video is available in French only. Use the Search or Explore site tools to select non-dialogue or English-language films and videos.
A meditation on mortality, mediated by a lifetime's compendium of images.
The camera scans a woman’s body in microscopic detail. A voice-over asks such questions as, “what is the dividing line between the public and the private?”.
"Un jour au camp Francosurvie" is a documentary that follows a group of youths (18-24) during their time at a French language summer camp in Maskwa Manitoba.
Khoa Lê chronicles his trip to Vietnam, visiting his remote family for the end of the year festivities.
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!
Hand-processed Super8 film as a dialogue with your darkest self.
How would you react to past situations? Are you over past issues and do new ones arise? Nicole Shimonek and Victoria Prince discuss the implications of the video of a younger Nicole writing on a chalkboard.
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.