KAMLOOPS (CANADA)
New York Times [New York NY]
August 9, 2024
By Alissa Wilkinson
“Sugarcane” follows survivors and investigators after the horrifying treatment of Indigenous Canadians was discovered at residential schools.
When it comes to stories that hold the potential to slide from sensitive to sensational, documentarians can take several approaches. There’s the talking-head driven journalistic approach, in which the story and its analysis are laid out, beat by beat. There’s also the more lurid approach that films about cults and crime can employ, with re-enactments and ominous musical cues.
But a third way — and the one that Emily Kassie and Julian Brave NoiseCat take in “Sugarcane” (in theaters), to their great credit — is to invite the audience to dwell alongside those affected by the story, letting their experiences and emotions guide the film. This one tells a horrifying story: In 2021 and 2022 in a series of cascading discoveries, unmarked graves were found on the grounds of a number of Indigenous Canadian residential schools. On investigation, they revealed horrifying mistreatment of Indigenous communities, where parents were virtually forced to send their children to the schools as part of the government’s quest to “solve the Indian problem.”
The film’s jumping-off point is the graves discovered at St. Joseph’s Mission, a residential school in British Columbia, near the Sugarcane Reserve of Williams Lake. NoiseCat’s father and grandmother were survivors of St. Joseph’s, and his journey to learn their immensely painful stories is one strand of the documentary.
There are others, too. Charlene Belleau and Whitney Spearing are two investigators working with the Williams Lake First Nation to uncover the truth about what happened at St. Joseph’s, and their determination helps fill in many of the disturbing details that were covered up at the time of the abuse. Rick Gilbert, a former chief of Williams Lake First Nation, was also educated at St. Joseph’s but is a faithful Catholic and reluctant to acknowledge the full extent of the atrocity — even when DNA tests appear to confirm that his father was one of the priests. He is summoned to the Vatican as part of an audience with Pope Francis regarding the discoveries. But his own story takes a long time to come out.
Kassie and NoiseCat braid these strands together, weaving in archival footage that shows how Indigenous people were stereotyped as lazy and subhuman. Furthermore, the film establishes, with very little room for argument, that the people operating the schools were aware that children were being molested and even raped by priests, but the victim’s stories were ignored. On the St. Joseph’s grounds, it becomes clear, infants born to girls were thrown into incinerators.
These are extremely difficult details to write about, let alone to watch. But “Sugarcane” is a must-see film, and not just because St. Joseph’s is one of hundreds of such schools — well over 500 in Canada and the United States — that were supported by the government and run by the Roman Catholic Church.
For one, it’s immersive and incredibly beautiful, shot like poetry and scored by Mali Obomsawin. The result is both stunning and sobering. And because Kassie and NoiseCat narrow their focus to the stories of St. Joseph’s survivors and their descendants, it’s breathtaking when they widen out to remind us that these stories are not isolated — that people all over North America are living with the repercussions of truth suppressed and violence enacted in the name of love and faith.
Alissa Wilkinson is a Times movie critic. She’s been writing about movies since 2005. More about Alissa Wilkinson