Sugarcane Is a “Gut-Punch”

The discovery of unmarked graves on what had been the grounds of several residential schools in Canada led to investigations into the abuse of Indigenous children who had been separated from their families and enrolled in what essentially amounted to a severe indoctrination program. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, well over a hundred of these schools in Canada and more than four hundred in the United States—most of them run by the Catholic Church—were established to “solve the Indian problem,” and the last of the schools wasn’t closed until 1997.

NoiseCat and Kassie interweave three narrative strands in what the Hollywood Reporter’s Lovia Gyarkye calls “a gut-punch of a documentary.” Charlene Belleau and Whitney Spearing lead an investigation into the atrocities committed at St. Joseph’s Mission, a residential school near the Sugarcane Reserve of Williams Lake in British Columbia. NoiseCat’s father was born and abandoned there, and he owes his life to the milk man who discovered and rescued the crying infant. And Rick Gilbert, a former chief of Williams Lake First Nation and still a devout Catholic, travels to Rome as part of a delegation sent to receive an apology from Pope Francis.

More than four thousand students are believed to have died while being held at these schools, and the reputation of St. Joseph’s was one of the most notorious. “Even the landscape speaks to an emotional duality,” writes Robert Abele in the Los Angeles Times. “It captivates with its natural beauty and sweep at the same time it tragically underscores the remoteness of places like St. Joseph’s, where evil could keep secret. A more heartrending sense of majesty eventually rises, though, from what it takes for people to tell their tales, which involve cruelty, rape, disappearance, murder, and suicide.”

In the New York Times, Alissa Wilkinson calls Sugarcane “a must-see film” and notes that “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.”

Sugarcane “doesn’t force conclusions that aren’t there,” writes Esther Zuckerman at IndieWire. “Instead, it lets the empty parts of the saga linger so the ghosts of what transpired feel present.”