‘Sugarcane’: Sundance Review

Dirs. Julian Brave NoiseCat, Emily Kassie. US/Canada, 2024. 106mins

The hard pound of inter-generational trauma on Canada’s Indigenous tribes never pauses for breath in Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie’s accomplished, devastating documentary about state-sponsored Catholic-run segregated boarding schools designed to “get rid of the Indian problem”. The grief here is all the more potent for the fact that it is still so difficult to express: Sugarcane’s child victims have taken their pain to unmarked graves and often prefer to do so than speak of the past.

 An important record and an artistic reckoning

There has been a lot of attention surrounding this story, which involved churches being set alight in parts of Canada in 2021 on the discovery of such unmarked graves. Yet this is no superficial recounting of yet another injustice against native people. It goes bone deep. Some high-quality specs, a thoughtful and personal aspect and a sense of spirituality which always transcends the moment mark Sugarcane as an important record and an artistic reckoning. Interest should be high post its world premiere at Sundance, with the ground perhaps laid by Scorsese’s work on native tribes in Killers Of The Flower Moon.

NoiseCat’s personal experience is a backbone to the film’s documentation of more than a century of abuse: even though he is a son and grand-son, his relatives find it hard to speak in front of co-director Emily Kassie’s camera. Partially, the survivors still do not understand: the injustice, in some cases literally, is written on their faces and across their DNA. 

The Catholic Church brought its concept of sin to St Joseph’s Mission in Williams Lake and the neighbouring Sugarcane reservation, and many more besides in Canada and North America, and NoiseCat’s film does wind its way ‘home’ to the Vatican at one point for answers. You can imagine echoes of pain from similar atrocities in Australia or Ireland underscoring the soundtrack, although the grim roll call of the surnames of abuser priests establishes that Ireland also exported and propagated its misery.

How, the world continues to wonder, did this racist, religious-administered victimisation and abuse of babies and children start and how was it allowed to continue for so long – the last such reformatory closed only in 1997? People are still killing themselves over what happened. Don’t ask Canadian premier Justin Trudeau or Pope Francis, though, as they stumble through belated apologies that shine no light on the sins of their institutions.

Julian NoiseCat’s father, Ed, is not ‘old’: as the film eventually reveals, he was born in 1959 in one of these institutions and sent in a garbage bin for incineration. The horror of his past rages on inside him (“I was born in a mission school and thrown away”). His mother cannot bear to speak of these events for which she was further imprisoned. The darkness has reached out to blunt Julian’s existence. 

They are not alone, as Sugarcane illustrates. Their language, Secwepemctsin, has been beaten out everyday use, but the community remains and its investigators, led by the stoic Charlene Belleau, have piled on the pressure for decades. They will never stop. “Did they think we’d be stupid all of our lives?” she asks as she carefully pins pictures to a whiteboard and uses red thread to link dead babies, dead children and older victims who have had their pain ignored to an ignominious series of photographs of clerics long-gone and removed to other parishes for their abuse to continue. McDonald, Casey, McGrath, Doughty, O’Connor: so many sins of the fathers.

The tribe soldiers on, though, with quiet determination. NoiseCat’s film is not a picture of down and outs, or a reservation misery memoir, although the consequences of the struggle are very clear. Strengthened by the pure force of the beauty of the environment (‘Canada is all Indian land’, as they sing) and a nature which is so clearly intrinsic to their lives, these First Nationers are elemental in a way their adversaries could only dream of becoming.