Winner, Sundance Directing Award

A stunning and brutal look at the lasting trauma of the St. Joseph’s Mission Residential School. As Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie’s film shows, the legacy of harm has echoed throughout generations as the survivors reckon with what they saw and endured. NoiseCat and Kassie follow a cast of characters throughout the Williams Lake First Nation in B.C, all of whom are connected to St. Joseph’s, which shut down in 1981. What results is as much a piece of art about the sins of the past as it is about living with the memory of those sins in the present… At the center of the narrative that the directors weave is NoiseCat himself —…along with his father Ed Archie NoiseCat, who was born at the school…Sugarcane doesn’t force conclusions that aren’t there. Instead, it lets the empty parts of the saga linger so the ghosts of what transpired feel present. It means, ultimately, that Sugarcane is something more meaningful than a mere history lesson. It’s a portrait of what remains when injustice occurs.–indieWire