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‘Sugarcane’ Review: Enlightening and Infuriating Look Into Systematic Abuse at an Indian Residential School
Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie deliver a quietly devastating account of unpunished crimes committed by representatives of the Catholic Church.
Indigenous filmmaker Julian Brave NoiseCat and co-director Emily Kassie 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. Two activists involved with the investigation, Charlene Belleau and Whitney Spearing, doggedly pursue leads and piece together evidence to document the full extent of the crimes against humanity at St. John’s, despite scant support from government agencies and the understandable reluctance of former students to testify. Another major figure in “Sugarcane”: Rick Gilbert, former chief of Williams Lake First Nation, who has somehow held true to his Catholic faith despite witnessing the atrocities at St. Joseph’s — and suspecting his father may have been one of the priests — and even takes it upon himself and his wife Anna to protect religious items from his church after hearing about the aforementioned arson epidemic.
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