Now at the Gene Siskel Film Center, “Sugarcane” is so compelling in what it’s saying, the how of it — the quiet, unerring grace of its filmmaking — doesn’t register fully until it’s almost over.
The documentary explores a heart-sickening tragedy of unchecked institutional abuse and worse, perpetrated by representatives and educators of the Catholic Church. It spanned generations, as we’ve learned and keep learning of related patterns in so many other places. “Sugarcane” has its hands full with its chosen subject, a single Catholic-run boarding school in Williams Lake, British Columbia, Canada, known at the time of its 1981 closing as St. Joseph’s Mission.
As with the U.S., the Canadian government required all Indigenous students to attend such schools, mostly Catholic-run, all with the intention of religious indoctrination with side benefits of ethnic and cultural shaming. Those who were actually born at St. Joseph’s, as one survivor says in “Sugarcane,” felt “thrown away” before they reached the age of five.
Named after the First Nations reserve of Williams Lake, “Sugarcane” comes from co-directors Emily Kassie and Julian Brave NoiseCat. For the latter this story is wrenchingly personal: His father, sculptor and artist Ed Archie NoiseCat, experienced horrific things at St. Joseph’s and witnessed more. We learn straight off in the documentary about eye-opening efforts to determine if widespread rumors and anecdotal evidence of 50 or more bodies buried on St. Joseph’s grounds are what they appear to be.
Kassie and NoiseCat intertwine various stories with exceptional fluidity here. In part “Sugarcane” works like an investigative mystery, with researchers Charlene Belleau and Whitney Spearing poring through microfiche copies of half-century-old newspaper clippings. One story in particular involves an infant discovered in a box, near the school’s incinerator. This hideous detail tells a larger, sinister story in “Sugarcane,” and the filmmakers resist every opportunity to amp up or falsify a single development. The truth is scalding enough.
Another major figure, Rick Gilbert, is a low-key, wryly forlorn St. Joseph’s survivor who is invited to Vatican City as part of the Indigenous Canadian contingent at a meeting with Pope Francis. The Pope, reading his words from a piece of paper, offers his condolences, “sorrow and shame” for the “abuses you suffered,” which were “deplorable.” Better than nothing, but without actions, and meaningful investigation and consequences, the film argues, it’s closer to nothing than something.
We hear what we’ve heard and read about so often: tales of abusive priests (“pests,” one Church correspondence puts it) shuffled from boarding school to boarding school; secrets festering inside extended families that rarely come out into the open. “Sugarcane” takes the time and the visual space to show us these families’ surroundings, and the cruelly comforting nature all around them. It’s the film of the week, to be sure, and you have a week to catch it at the Film Center.
“Sugarcane” — 4 stars (out of 4)
MPA rating: R (for some language)
Running time: 1:47
How to watch: Through Aug. 22 at the Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State St.; siskelfilmcenter.org
