Julian Brave NoiseCat initially didn’t want “Sugarcane” to be such a personal film. The Indigenous filmmaker says he intended to remain behind the camera for the Sundance prize-winning documentary, which he co-directed with Toronto’s Emily Kassie. The film is a quietly haunting account of deaths, rapes, suicides and missing children at the former St.
Joseph’s Mission Residential School, a Catholic-run facility near Sugar Cane reserve in Williams Lake, B.C. But NoiseCat quickly realized the film would be incomplete if he and his family weren’t part of it.
“My family had stories that cut to the core of the infanticide that happened at St. Joseph’s Mission,” NoiseCat, a member of the Canim Lake Band in British Columbia, says on a recent video call from Martha’s Vineyard, where he was screening the film. “I felt that if I wasn’t willing to go there with my own story and my own family’s story, then would I really be giving this documentary my all?” NoiseCat appears in the doc with his father Ed Archie NoiseCat, who was born at St.
Joseph’s Mission. The film explores long-standing allegations that priests who fathered children with school residents sent the infants to an incinerator. “Sugarcane,” which won the directing prize at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, explores the horrors at St.
Joseph’s and its ripple effects, while putting human faces to the tragic legacy of Canada’s residential school system, featuring testimonials from surviv.