Plenty of movies are meant to be an escape, a fleeting couple hours' entertainment featuring superheroes or meet-cutes or triumphant protagonist's journeys. In the world of documentaries, escapism is hard to come by, as these films hold a mirror up to real-life circumstances and reflect back to us any number of realities, including lives lived in the spotlight, new historical discoveries or a particular moment in time as it happens.
Sugarcane, a powerful new documentary co-directed by Emily Kassie and Julian Brave NoiseCat, offers absolutely no chance to look away from a frightening reality long brushed under the rug, and the brutality of the subject matter coupled with the personal stories recounted with vulnerability and honesty, is what makes it as compelling as it is troubling. The film recounts the terrible history of the Canadian government's program to relocate Indian children from reservations into "residential schools," boarding schools mostly run by the Catholic Church and designed to whitewash out the children's culture and personal histories.
Co-director NoiseCat is also a key subject of the film, as he navigates the generational trauma he's inherited from the abuse his father and other community members on the Sugarcane Reservation experienced. The documentary's filming coincides with Canada's recent efforts to make amends for the atrocities committed at the schools (more on that later) as well as Pope Francis' 2022 formal apology for the Catholic Church's role in the abuse. It all combines to create a film that is both broad in scope, educating its audiences on the deeply tragic history of these schools, and profoundly personal, following several community members on their journeys to reckon with the long-tail effects of the program.
As the documentary opens, we're told there were hundreds of residential schools across Canada, but the film zooms in on NoiseCat's community and the St. Joseph's Mission where the story begins for Ed Archie NoiseCat, Julian's father. We also meet Rick Gilbert, former chief of Williams Lake First Nation whose history is closely tied to the school, and Charlene Belleau and Whitney Spearing, two women doggedly researching the history of the school in an attempt to uncover the full scope of both the crimes and the cover-up.
The breadth and atrocity of those crimes are almost too heartbreaking to reference here, but suffice it to say they include all the worst of the worst things one may imagine, from molestation and rape to infanticide and more. Much of the film has to do with the discovery of dozens of unmarked graves in the vicinity of the school, as well as the personal discoveries of people like Gilbert, an apparently kind and good-hearted man who's carried unthinkable trauma buried deep inside throughout his life.
The film's most powerful moments are the systemic and personal revelations uncovered as it goes on, and it would be a disservice to share those here. That the filmmakers capture such intimate and shocking discoveries on film—and that the subjects revealing them have agreed to share them—speaks volumes to the care and empathy with which the film was made. Honoring that space for each new audience to discover it for themselves seems like the least one can do.
In a film filled with harrowing themes and difficult truths, some of the most moving scenes are the ones that highlight the resilience and persistence of NoiseCat, Gilbert, Belleau and their communities, people who will no longer be silent about the wrongs committed against them but who also refuse to lose their own humanity in the face of such resolute evil.
At one point, Gilbert converses with a priest about the circumstances he lived because of the school and its abusers; in an exchange that is so frustrating one might be forgiven for cursing audibly as it unfolds, the priest tries to tell Gilbert that forgiveness is a two-way street and Gilbert may one day find his way to embracing it. Anyone in similar circumstances might've stood up and thrown the chair on which he's sitting, but Gilbert calmly and beautifully replies that the Bible also says apologies are meaningless without action, and that's all he or anyone wants: change and accountability. It's a masterclass in civility and infuriating to think he or any of the other survivors have to assume such a heavy responsibility.
Film is capable of telling every kind of story, with every tone and visual style imaginable, and it's part of the art form's allure that it is so versatile and able to be so endlessly reimagined. A film like Sugarcane reminds us that film is also an active player in our collective history keeping (and making), and that if chronicled with such sensitivity and assertiveness as on display here, it is essential viewing.
Sugarcane is now playing at Siskel Film Center.