During the 19th and 20th centuries, government programs in both the United States and Canada forcibly separated Indigenous children from their families, relocating them to residential boarding schools to “civilize” them. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada has acknowledged this as a form of cultural genocide. In 2021, this awful history got a fresh round of public discourse when surveying work on the grounds of the Kamloops residential school in British Columbia identified around 200 unmarked graves. (Officially, 51 children are currently recognized as having died at the school.)
These events spurred Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie to collaborate on Sugarcane (2024), a documentary about Canada’s residential school system. It’s told from the perspective of now-elderly survivors of St. Joseph’s Mission, another such school in British Columbia, including Julian’s father, Ed. (The documentary gets its name from the nearby Williams Lake Indian Reserve, which is often called “Sugarcane.”) The film’s investigation into the circumstances of Ed’s birth at the school leads to disquieting evidence of infanticide.
We sat down with NoiseCat and Kassie over Zoom to discuss the delicate process of having NoiseCat participate as both co-director and subject, as well as how they got the residents of Williams Lake to trust them. This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
Hyperallergic: How did you come together to work on this film, and what caused Julian to expand his role from co-director to on-camera participant?
Julian Brave NoiseCat: Em approached me to collaborate with her on a documentary about Indian residential schools on the day of the discovery of 215 potential unmarked graves at the Kamloops school. I hesitated; I took about two weeks to think about it. I had just signed a book contract, and I had never written a book before and I’d never made a film before. Doing both at the same time seemed a little bit crazy. But I knew my family had a very painful connection to the residential schools. I didn’t know the specifics because we never talked about it. To work on that subject in a new medium felt risky, and I wasn’t sure if I was ready.
But I did agree, and when I called Em to say so, that’s when she told me she’d identified a First Nation that was leading a search [for more unmarked graves]. It was the Williams Lake First Nation, and they were investigating St. Joseph’s Mission. That was the school my family was sent to and where my father was born. And as the investigation and the documentary unfolded, I was increasingly pulled into the story by members of my own family, by our participants, by the events themselves. It took about a year from when we started before I became a participant myself.
It took a long time to get comfortable with incorporating my family’s story, which is quite traumatic and which was largely unknown to me at the time — particularly the story of my father’s birth, which even he did not know before. But ultimately it felt like if there was any story that deserved our all, this would be it. I needed to go there with my own family trauma, particularly since other participants, like the late Chief Rick Gilbert, trusted us with so much of their own most painful truths when they had no authorship of the work.
Emily Kassie: I’m an investigative journalist and have made short films and multimedia stories in the context of newsrooms, and I’ve been making docs since I was 14. But despite having covered human rights abuses and genocide around the world, I’d never turned my lens on my own country. I felt gut-pulled to tell the story, and I knew immediately that the person to do this with was Julian. We worked our first reporting jobs together almost a decade ago; we randomly sat next to each other and developed a fast friendship.
I didn’t come in hoping that he would be in the film, because I thought that would be very difficult. I knew that if he was going to do that, he’d have to really want to, because it would take so much of himself. And eventually he came to that point, and when he did, it was extraordinary. By then we had built such an incredible collaboration and so much trust that I could be there for him as he transitioned between directing and being a participant.
H: How did you share responsibilities as co-directors? Did each of you have the lead on specific elements of the production, or was everything a balancing act?
EK: Because we were making a vérité film, we weren’t doing sit-down interviews, we were following things as they happened. I was shooting, and Christopher LaMarca, our director of photography, was often shooting with me, and Jules would be present as well. At the end of each day, we’d all get together. We were living together, so we would go to our communal space and sit on the couch and eat a lot of snacks and talk about what we had seen and the themes and ideas and perspectives we wanted to incorporate. There wasn’t a formal setup where we were putting up lights together and sitting down and asking questions. We were just following the story and creating a shared vision for how to interweave it and our themes. There are these tensions between faith and the spirit world and this idea of “cowboys and Indians,” because we were in this Western town. What would bring that to life?
JBNC: It was a constant dialogue, from the moment we were in the field together to the nights afterward to the edit. We were watching, working through our ideas, thinking through what stories to follow and how. It became a shared vision for what the project would be and could be. That was crucial in the edit, when we had thousands of hours of footage to put together. It was our North Star that helped us always get back to the film we wanted to make.
H: And you both spent a lot of time living with Ed [Julian’s father].
JBNC: I lived with my dad the entire time. I moved in with him for the film, the book, for life in general. I had been on the East Coast for a decade, working in politics and journalism before turning full-time to writing and film. I moved back west to work on those projects. This film is so much about my relationship with my dad, and so is my book. We spent all this time together, and it was the first time I’d lived with him since I was a small child. That was core to the documentary and our camaraderie, to our ability to have some of the difficult conversations we had on camera. It also brought me closer to my family on the rez, which is within driving distance of where I live now. We spent a ton of time together, both when making the film and just in life. Bringing me closer to my people and my home was essential not just to the film, but also my life beyond that.
H: Is that kind of physical proximity the key to getting the participants to be vulnerable with you?
JBNC: Yeah. Obviously, being from that community is incredibly helpful. Still, from the moment Em showed up, she signaled to people that she was all in on this, that she was going to do it with a very loving, open presence in their lives. On the very first night, Chief Willie Sellars and Francis Johnson, Jr., a chief from a neighboring community called Esket, took Em down to the Fraser River. You could die going down this trail, and Em had her camera. They were holding onto her backpack to prevent her from sliding into the rapids. She was there until 4 am filming them dip-netting for sockeye [salmon]. From that, to descending to the bottom of a grave as it was being dug by Chief Willie Sellars, to living with the late Chief Rick Gilbert for a couple of weeks before he went to the Vatican, Em showed up – sometimes for things we weren’t even filming. That was the kind of relationship we built, and that made the trust you feel in the film possible.
EK: Wielded the right way, a camera can give people agency and tell them they matter. If you create the right space for people to be heard, it can be a profound tool that allows people to open up and to move through things. We approached people with respect and integrity and the belief that they were each worthy of epic storytelling. I think they could feel that from us.
H: Was it difficult to gain the level of trust and access to them that you achieved? You watch them go through some searing emotional moments. Julian, you share one yourself with your father.
JBNC: It was essential from the outset that we had affirmative consent. Part of the origin of the documentary is that the Williams Lake First Nation wanted this story to be told. The day before we approached them, their council had a conversation about this investigation and how they wanted it to be documented. They understood what we were doing. With all our participants — Rick Gilbert and my own family especially — we only would go there when it was the right time, when we had built up trust and people felt like they were ready.
In the early going, we asked Rick some hard questions about his experience at the school and his parentage. At the time, he appeared ready to talk about it, but then he felt a lot of shame and regret for sharing what he had, so we had a very explicit conversation with him over lunch a few weeks later where we told him, “Hey, we don’t need to use any of this. We don’t need you to participate at all. We just want to buy you lunch and get to know you and spend time with you. And if you ever feel open to going back there again, we are here and ready.” It took a number of months, but we ended up following Rick to Rome, where he confronted the Catholic order that abused him with his deepest, darkest secret: his parentage, which was from a rape at the mission. To get there with him, we had to learn a little bit, but more importantly, we had to build deep trusting relationships and be patient with people. We are not the agents of this story; they are.
EK: One early conversation I had with Chris was that we’d exclusively use prime lenses, which can’t zoom. That means you have to move your body to get close to things. The film is quite close to its subjects. We felt that intimacy had to be earned, that my body would have to be close to them. That took time and trust.
As Julian pointed out, Rick went from not trusting that we were the people to tell the story to allowing me to film him as he revealed to a priest the most difficult moment of his life. Being able to watch his face transform and for him to have the strength to do that was such a big journey, two years from where we started with him.
With Julian and his father, I think I became part of the fabric of their lives. I was just around for so long. We became so close that by the time they were ready to have that conversation, we could film it. And I could feel Julian not just as a participant, but as my friend and co-director. Our connection — and Ed’s trust in us — allowed that scene to unfold.
H: One element of these events that hasn’t been reported on before your film is what looks to be a pattern of infanticide at this residential schools. Do you know of any further reporting being done on these crimes?
EK: This is a story that’s told in many communities about many schools. For the first time, this film presents testimony and evidence that it actually happened. We hope this film is a catalyst for this reporting to continue, both in Canada and the United States. We don’t think that this was particular to one school, and we hope the people covering the film will highlight that. This is new information, and the Catholic Church and the Canadian government have not yet been held accountable.
JBNC: It’s so fucking crazy that, as one of the directors of this documentary and a participant in it, I happen to be the son of the only known survivor of the incinerator at St. Joseph’s Mission. What are the fucking odds?
Sugarcane (2024), directed by Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie, continues at Film Forum, New York, through August 20, and screens at select theaters across the United States and Canada.