It’s been 10 months since “Sugarcane” first premiered at Sundance, where it picked up the Directing Award: U.S. for documentary. Since then, directors Emily Kassie and Julian Brave NoiseCat have landed a worldwide distribution deal with National Geographic Documentary Films and have traveled across the world with their film, now stopping at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam as part of the Best of Fests strand.
“Sugarcane” follows a long-coming reckoning at the titular reserve, sparked by the discovery of unmarked graves on the grounds of an Indian residential school run by the Catholic Church in Canada in 2021. The documentary explores how Indigenous communities were forced to suppress years of separation, assimilation and abuse committed against their children by a system designed to “solve the Indian problem.”
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Speaking about the first drive for the film, Kassie, a journalist with years of experience in portraying stories of persecuted peoples and human rights violations, says she had never previously considered turning her gaze to her home country. “When I first heard about the unmarked graves at one of the abusive assimilationist schools, I felt horrified and knew very clearly that this was a story I wanted to follow and that I wanted to do it with Julian.”
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Kassie and NoiseCat worked together as journalists years prior, with Kassie continuing to follow his work as a writer, storyteller and journalist focusing on Indigenous life in North America. “I was at my sister’s wedding when Julian called me back and it was so important I spoke to him that I stepped out of my sister’s wedding to take his call,” she recalls.
“I had just signed a book contract and I had never made a film of any kind, so I didn’t know if I could do both,” NoiseCat tells Variety of first being approached by Kassie. “Then, I think more to the point, when you see the film it becomes kind of obvious that my family had a very intense connection to the residential schools and I didn’t know what the specifics of that story were for my father. I just knew there was a story there.”
NoiseCat and his dad, artist Ed Archie, are featured prominently in the film. Archie was born on the grounds of St. Joseph’s Mission, the school featured at the center of “Sugarcane,” and was found as a baby atop a trash incinerator where newborns were suspected of being burned alive to conceal the clergy’s systemic rape of students. To this day, Archie is the only known baby to have survived the incinerator at St. Joseph’s.
It is an eerie coincidence that NoiseCat’s family had such strong ties with the school Kassie honed into before her co-director officially joined the project. “I thought she might be messing with me,” said NoiseCat of when he first learned about the happenstance. “There are 139 residential schools that Emily could have chosen to focus on, and she happened to focus on the one school my family was taken to.”
“When I initially agreed to collaborate, it was not as a participant, it was as a co-director,” he adds. “For the first year of filming, there was no understanding that I or my family would be a subject in any way, shape or form. I like how the film came together where it happened organically and was driven by the circumstances of people around me.”
Also in the film is the story of Rick Gilbert, former chief of Williams Lake First Nation and a man who held to his Catholicism despite not only witnessing but possibly being a product himself of the atrocities at St. Joseph’s. “People, in particular Rick, trusted us with their stories when they had no authorship or editorial control of this work,” highlights NoiseCat.
“As the son of the only known survivor of the incinerator and the descendant of a story that had gone undocumented, unreported and untold, I had a responsibility to my community on where to go with that story,” he adds. “Ultimately, I feel we had the right approach editorially and creatively but also the right approach for my life and my family.”
Commenting on the responsibility of stepping into a community other than her own, Kassie says, “The history of documentary is pretty extractive when it comes to Indigenous people. The first ‘documentary’ is ‘Nanook of the North’ about the Inuk people in Canada and it’s a false portrait of a primitive people. Director Robert J. Flaherty fathered kids up there and then disappeared for the rest of his life. That’s a pretty problematic history.”
“I think there is another path,” she continues. “The camera — if wielded with care and thoughtfulness and intention and time and patience — can be used to give people agency. This requires approaching it all from a place of reciprocity and deep listening.”
Another key contributor to the “Sugarcane” journey is Oscar-nominated actor Lily Gladstone, who boarded the project as an executive producer. “We are incredibly grateful that Lily joined our team. She has almost single-handedly created opportunities for Indigenous stories and storytellers in a place that has been very hostile to them like Hollywood,” NoiseCat says of their partnership.
“[Gladstone] is a descendant of survivors of boarding schools and I think it’s important to have someone whose life and family was also impacted by these situations now be a champion of our film,” he concludes.
When asked about their 10-month journey with “Sugarcane,” NoiseCat says the reception has been “incredible,” adding that he recently experienced a “full circle moment” when invited to attend President Biden’s apology to the Native American boarding school survivors.
“Before I took the time to work fully on writing and film, I had the honor of advocating for the appointment of Deb Haaland as the first ever Native American cabinet secretary in the United States,” he goes on. “Secretary Haaland came to our premiere at Sundance and to have our film be part of a conversation stretching out to the Vatican, the Parliament and the White House has been very special.”
Kassie interjects to say that, despite the overwhelming reception to their film, “The death toll of schools like St. Joseph’s Mission continues to climb and I don’t know what more will be done other than apologies. The Catholic Church and both [the U.S. and Canada’s] governments have still not opened their records so that survivors can know the truth and they need that to move forward. There is still work to do.”
Still, the director says that she feels “very lucky” to be in conversation with other documentaries made this year. “In a moment in the world that is very chaotic and brutal, we hope there is more room for films like ours going forward. We feel lucky to have a platform and hope our peers — now friends — get the same opportunity.”
