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At St. Joseph’s Mission School, near Williams Lake in British Columbia’s picturesque Sugarcane Valley, the past casts a long shadow. For over a century, Indigenous children were forcibly taken here, cut off from family and culture, in an attempt to assimilate them into Euro-Canadian ways. Dire abuses took place within its walls before it closed in 1981. Now, filmmakers Emily Kassie and Julian Brave NoiseCat seek to shed light on this darkness in their powerful new documentary, Sugarcane.

Joining the community in investigating mounting allegations, Kassie and NoiseCat guide us through a harrowing unearthing of the truth. We learn of the investigators working to identify those who never returned home and the anguish of survivors breaking decades of silence. NoiseCat also shares his own family ties; his father was born at St. Joseph’s, though its impact has remained unspoken. Through these intimate threads, a larger portrait emerges of...

At the Sundance 2024 world premiere of “Sugarcane” at The Library in Park City, the crowd jumped to their feet for a standing ovation; rookie director Julian Brave NoiseCat and Canadian filmmaker Emily Kassie thanked the participants on hand from British Columbia’s Williams Lake First Nation.

NoiseCat’s father, Ed Archie NoiseCat, became part of the story. And he was there at Sundance, along with tireless investigator Charlene Belleau, who was tracking evidence, uncovered in 2021, of unmarked graves on the grounds of an Indian residential school run by the Catholic Church in Canada. The filmmakers embedded themselves in the community to try and break the pattern of silence around the forced separation, assimilation, and abuse many children experienced at these segregated boarding schools. What they uncovered was shocking.

The film won the Sundance U.S. Directing Award for Documentary, and later collected more awards at a string of festivals. And...

It’s altogether likely that many non-Indigenous people knew nothing about the abuse and disappearances of Native American children that occurred over decades in residential Indian schools throughout North America until those outages inspired a wrenchingly potent subplot last year for the Taylor Sheridan-produced TV series “1923.” But the truth behind that fact-based fiction is even more shocking, and infuriating, as detailed in “Sugarcane,” the remarkable film that received a well-deserved jury prize for documentary direction at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

Co-directors Emily Kassie and Indigenous filmmaker Julian Brave NoiseCat show restraint and empathy while cataloguing the horrors that were endemic at the now-shuttered St. Joseph’s Mission residential school near the Sugarcane Reservation of Williams Lake in British Columbia. But their disciplined approach to their material actually makes the movie even more effective in its cumulative impact, especially during interviews with survivors of St. Joseph’s — including...

With Sugarcane, filmmakers Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie deliver a multilayered film that invites audiences to confront questions about morality and justice, and to bear witness to the lasting intergenerational trauma of the Williams Lake First Nations (Secwepemc or Shuswap Nation) people stemming from the residential school system that included forced family separation, physical and sexual abuse, and the destruction of First Nation culture and language. Drawing on their backgrounds in activism and journalism — as well as NoiseCat’s own personal connection to the story and community — the filmmakers deftly weave together multiple strands to form this compelling, heartbreaking narrative.

Demonstrating unparalleled humanity, and compassion for the affected First Nation communities in North America, the powerful documentary operates from a place of pure and total empathy. At the same time, NoiseCat and Kassie recognize the resilience of the survivors and their descendants, and their determination to seek answers to long-buried secrets.

There’s a moment in Sugarcane, a gut-punch of a documentary, when a central subject relays his shattering experiences with Catholic-run Native American schools in Canada. He goes quiet after testifying to a somber-looking clergyman. The camera stays with both people, allowing us to observe years of pain in the survivor’s crestfallen face and the sorrowful posture of the listener. “Being sorry is the first step,” the subject says after the priest apologizes for the role the Catholic Church played in abusing Native populations. “You have to take action.”

At the heart of Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie’s powerful film is this question of action. How do you act when faced with violence from the past? What does accountability look like? The documentary, which premiered in competition at Sundance, braids three narratives connected to the discovery of unmarked graves near St. Joseph’s Mission, an Indian residential...

“Sugarcane,” the documentary that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival this week, is billed as “an investigation,” but its silences speak louder than its revelations.

The film from directors Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie is a stunning and brutal look at the lasting trauma of the St. Joseph’s Mission Residential School, a government-funded institution run by the Catholic Church where indigenous children were sent with the aim of stripping them of the connection to their culture. The abuses that took place at St. Joseph’s and the places around North America like it were innumerable — though much of the evidence of wrongdoing is, devastatingly, lost to time. But as NoiseCat and Kassie’s film shows, the legacy of harm has echoed throughout generations as the survivors reckon with what they saw and endured, keeping some of their experiences, too painful to fully grasp, buried.

NoiseCat and Kassie follow...