Sugarcane movie review & film summary (2024)

Focusing in particular on St. Joseph’s Mission in Williams Lake, BC, Canada (closed in 1981), the documentary pieces together the testimony of former students and anthropological investigators to unearth the damning details of the violent systematic oppression that was allowed to inflict trauma and death upon a century of generations of their community. What ensues is a devastating bombshell of a reckoning.

Co-directors Emily Kassie and Julian Brave Noisecat (the latter of which, along with his father, Ed, and grandmother, are subjects in this documentary) have, alongside the revelation of these historical wounds to public light via news media, entered the personal stories and voices that are vital to the understanding of these tragedies and the history of the oppression of American Natives. The discovery of unmarked graves incited the investigation into the school itself, and “Sugarcane” brings the story home.

The finesse and care with which Kassie and Noisecat unveil and explore the happenings and residual aftershocks of St. Joseph’s Mission bring the film to another level. Rather than functioning as a dossier, it instead serves as an investigation of generational trauma. From a litany of onsite deaths and unmarked graves to routine abuse and children fathered (and horrifically rid of) by the staff, the horrors of these institutions seemingly have no end. Yet these listed crimes pertain only to the time frame within which students were enrolled. The aftermath of these traumas also bears mortal consequences in the present day via PTSD, substance abuse, and suicide in the communities of alumni. As the film proclaims, “Indigenous peoples are still dying from residential schools. And still living, despite them.”

With a triad of personal avenues to unpack the reverb of influence – Noisecat’s relationship with his father, influenced by the latter’s lifelong struggle to cope with his origins (and his own mother’s pain in doing in the same), the religious and ancestral reckoning of the late Chief Rick Gilbert, and the overarching criminal research by investigators Whitney Spearing and Charlene Belleau – “Sugarcane” is deeply human, giving living, breathing faces and families to a history that, even when acknowledged, is too often rendered monolithic and impersonal. It begs the action of accountability, something so frequently symbolic rather than reparative, displayed through thin acknowledgments from Trudeau and a hollow offering of sympathy from Pope Francis (with no apology, compensation, or artifact returns to follow).