By the time Julian Brave NoiseCat gets around to asking his father Ed to join him in an investigation of the circumstances in which he was born, you know what a difficult request it is for both in “Sugarcane.” Ed’s mother has never spoken about her time at St. Joseph’s, one of the residential schools set up across North America to house and reeducate the indigenous people, typically pulled apart from any families they may have had when they were young, and Ed surely doesn’t feel he needs to know more than what she’s been willing to tell him, preferring to look forward rather than back when all it can bring is pain. The mere fact that Julian feels he needs more clarity about his ancestry, a generation removed, is indicative of the limbo that Native Americans have had to endure ever since such schools were established in the 1800s and have left families as broken today as when the separation occurred centuries ago.
That would be tragic enough if that were all NoiseCat and co-director Emily Kassie were able to bring to the surface in “Sugarcane,” but they excavate something far more acutely evil as they join the activist Charlene Belleau at her pinboard on a fact-finding mission that started well before cameras ever began to roll, attempting to get to the bottom of what happened at St. Joseph’s. The investigation has taken on greater urgency when the discovery of 93 unmarked graves in 2021 and the international attention it received has made a more rigorous inquiry inevitable, but in attending community meetings and following around the current First Nations Chief Willie Sellars and his predecessor Rick Gilbert, NoiseCat and Kassie show how the appetite for pursuing the truth of what happened is a subject of internal debate as much as NoiseCat finds with his own father when the few remaining who could speak to their experience at the school remain tight-lipped if their memories have stayed intact at all and people believe they know enough about the horrors not to want to dig any deeper.
With the intrepid Belleau’s decades-long pursuit of justice laying the groundwork, NoiseCat and Kassie proceed to collect the kind of truly shocking evidence against the clergy that ran St. Joseph’s that any true crime series producer would lust after, but they’re admirably after something more ambitious with a fractured narrative coming to reflect the people on screen who are left to wander around not exactly knowing the source of their pain or the ways in which it’s blinding them towards pursuing a future. Scenes of communal ceremonies and traditions can be looked upon as signs of resilience but also stasis when just as they have been passed down, so have the plagues that they have lived with since settlers came around as many struggle with alcohol addiction and feel compelled out of shame to hold onto secrets that they never should’ve had in the first place. While the incumbent First Nations Chief Sellars faces a barrage of hate mail in his inbox every morning when pursuing the case, Gilbert’s reticence during his tenure can be understood not only from seeing what Sellars is up against, but gradually in his own connection to St. Joseph’s, a mental block that the filmmakers identify with the kind of patience and compassion that one suspects will be the only way anything close to a resolution will occur.
The atrocities that “Sugarcane” uncovers are bound to leave audience speechless, but the filmmakers are impressively conscious of what’s necessary to start a dialogue around a subject that no one wants to discuss, let alone have a proper vocabulary for, both amongst those who have been directly affected and a broader audience who couldn’t possibly fathom how this could happen. Yet when the challenges to have any communication at all are conveyed so vividly, the hope emerges in the film’s own ability to engage, politely disagreeing with those who believe the past should be left be but having to spend little time there itself when it can see it so actively shaping the present.
“Sugarcane” does not yet have U.S. distribution.
