“Sugarcane” - Film Review
Sugarcane opens with a shot of the Canadian countryside. The picturesque land is disrupted by the object of the camera’s focus – a statue of the Virgin Mary holding baby Jesus. It’s a familiar sight to many and, on its own, is not something that would be jarring to see. The statue that’s shown in Sugarcane is distorted. Its stone is weathered in a way that looks like it’s covered in blood. Symbolically, it is. Sugarcane, directed by Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie, is a documentary that follows an investigation into the residential schools in Canada and the ripple effects these schools are still having on the survivors and their families.
Credit: Emily Kassie/Sugarcane Film LLC
The Canadian Indian residential school system was a government-funded program that forcibly separated Indigenous children from their families as a means of isolating them, with the end goal of assimilation and erasure of Indigenous cultures. These schools existed for over a century and were breeding grounds for abuse, neglect, and death. The true impact of the schools is not known in a numerical sense because of shoddy record-keeping, but the emotional repercussions are clear. Survivors and their children, director NoiseCat being a direct descendant, are seeking justice and public information about what they endured at these schools. Sugarcane follows NoiseCat’s personal investigation, as well as the larger fight to persevere.
To bear witness is an essential, difficult task. It’s the act of looking down the barrel of the past to view history in all its ugliness. Sugarcane effortlessly blends archival footage with present-day imagery, as though the memories are never far from the minds of the survivors and their descendants. The trauma inflicted by these schools did not begin with those who lived through them, just as they will not be the last to feel the lasting effects. Residential schools are a modern means of colonialism that has been in existence for as long as humans have traveled outside their own communities. Through Sugarcane’s vérité approach, the subjects of the film are able to be vulnerable about their experiences. “I’ll never forget, and it’s pretty hard to forgive,” one survivor says about a particularly gruesome memory. As painful as it is to speak about these memories, there is something to be gained by telling their stories in the hopes that it never happens again.
Credit: Emily Kassie/Sugarcane Film LLC
“Indigenous people are still dying from residential schools. And still living, despite them,” are the words Sugarcane leaves the audience with. Many films in this awards season have dealt with the idea of living in spite of something. Of looking at the horrors of the past in an attempt to find a better future. Nickel Boys in particular connects to Sugarcane. While the school in Nickel Boys is not a residential one, it was one that proclaimed to be a place of reform, but was filled with violence and murder, just like the residential schools. Neither film shies away from the fact that immense trauma exists in the lives of its characters or subjects, and both understand that the audience doesn’t need to see the brutality to understand it. There’s a fine line between searching for information and using tragedy to satisfy a viewer’s morbid curiosity. Sugarcane is compassionate, yet damning, a delicate balance of genocidal exposé and a space to heal.
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