Sugarcane

Canadians have been grappling with the true extent of the horrors of the Residential School system since the discovery of more than 200 potential unmarked graves at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in May 2021, a reckoning that is still in its early stages. Sugarcane is an important contribution to this story, focusing on another BC Residential School, at St. Joseph’s Mission — near the Sugarcane reserve — in Williams Lake. For those who continue to deny or to downplay the impact of a colonial system explicitly designed to eradicate Indigenous culture, this should be mandatory viewing.

With sensitivity and compassion, the film introduces us to those doing the hard labour of researching the past, to traumatized survivors who attended the school as children, and to the children of these children, carrying emotional scars they have inherited but cannot fully comprehend. Among these, co-director Julian Brave Noisecat, who journeys with his father Ed back to Williams Lake in the hope of forging the a personal reconciliation across the generational divide.

Aug 23: Filmmakers in attendance

A gut-punch of a documentary.

Lovia Gyarkye, Hollywood Reporter

A deeply impactful work… Sugarcane deftly and profoundly provides a means by which the greater process of understanding is to be accomplished. There’s a sweetness to Sugarcane that should not be under appreciated, as beneath the tears and terrors of the past there is a story of survival that’s so seldom articulated as gracefully. We meet some truly remarkable individuals and, through them, become guests into this community and given access to moments of emotional intimacy that are extremely compelling.

Jason Gorber, POV magazine