SUGARCANE - Mark Reviews Movies

Sugarcane, National Geographic Documentary Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 8, 2024

Detailing one of the many systematic crimes perpetrated against the indigenous peoples of North America, Sugarcane follows the investigation into abuse and possible murder at residential schools for Indigenous children in Canada, as well as the stories of some survivors of the schools. The last of these schools, funded by the federal government and often run by the Catholic Church, closed in 1997. Directors Emily Kassie and Julian Brave NoiseCat make it clear that this is not just a matter of history. It is one for the here and now.

The documentary provides four main story threads, all of them based within the Williams Lake First Nation in British Columbia. One follows investigator Charlene Belleau, a former student of the St. Joseph's Mission school, which now stands derelict but intact amidst a vast field. Belleau's job is to oversee the discovery of evidence for wrongdoing by school officials, interviewing other former students and simply looking at what has been left behind. In a haunting scene, Belleau brings the filmmakers to the upper level of a barn, where names have written on or etched into the walls.

The stories of those names might never be specifically known, because the tragic mystery of them has to do with missing and/or dead children, as well as a string of unreported births at the school. Some of the deaths, as children attempted to flee from their legal abduction from their families and homes under Canadian law, were contemporaneously reported but brushed aside as acts of rebellion, used as "proof" that these children required the perceived order and civilizing effect the school could give them.

Too many children went missing, though, for the official reports to be complete, and with the discovery of unmarked graves on the school grounds, Belleau and her team decide to do radar scans of more of the place. Those who followed the news of these discoveries when they were made, of course, know what will be uncovered here, and the filmmakers' assumption of the audience's awareness means the film can move beyond the inevitable facts of the investigation.

Instead, Kassie and NoiseCat spend time with the survivors. They include Belleau, who worked for decades to push for a look into these schools (The filmmakers show her activism over the years), and those she interviews during the course of the investigation, but it expands past her and her work.

This leads to two compelling and heartbreaking case studies. One features Rick Gilbert, a former student at St. Joseph's who has since spent his life a devout Catholic, even working at a local church. He cleans the interior, maintains the grounds of the adjoining cemetery, and hosts a radio broadcast of Christmas music when the season arrives. After doing one of those online genetics tests, Gilbert learns that his ancestry is half Native American and about half Irish. A family tree keeps pointing him to relative with the same last name—one shared by the priest who served as the school's principal.

As he reckons with that information, NoiseCat brings the film's other most personal story to the forefront. It involves his own father, a man who has lived in relative isolation for years. The two men head out on the road to visit the father's family with a lot of hesitation on his part. Father and son talk on the way, initially not about much, since the father doesn't like to speak of his past or the unknown parts of his origin, but gradually growing in as much honesty as is possible under the circumstances.

There's a scene at a hotel here, in which the two men discover each has shared memories of watching the other drive away from the house, that opens up the father's wounds of feeling abandoned, only for NoiseCat to point out that's another thing he and his father share. Whether or not the young NoiseCat was even alive when the boarding schools were still in operation is irrelevant. The pain and suffering caused by them has passed through generations, and this tenuous relationship is evidence of that fact.

More and more facts come to light. Belleau's team uses testimonies and eyewitness accounts to find specific spots for the radar scans. Chief Willie Sellars, whose role serves as the fourth and least developed of the film's narrative threads, makes television appearances to provide context, has to read and respond to emails filled with hatred and victim-blaming, and stands silent at a press conference that offers words of apology and a promise of doing something without many specifics.

Meanwhile, Gilbert travels to Rome, where Pope Francis is scheduled to meet with and speak to representatives from assorted tribes across North America, while also confronting the current head of the religious order that ran St. Joseph's. The NoiseCats return home, where one side of the father's family knows nothing and his mother can barely bring herself to mention the school without breaking down into tears (The camera is absent from the reunion, which we only hear).

Sugarcane becomes defined by its air of perpetual melancholy, for innocence and potential and lives lost to a system that went unchecked and rewarded for more than a century. The devastation can be assessed by those unmarked graves and the few reports that actually exist, most of which were covered up by those in power in the church and in government, but the filmmakers go directly to the source for these stories, revealing years and generations of trauma that cannot start to heal, because no one has even acknowledged its existence until now.

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