St. Joseph’s Mission, a Native American boarding school in Williams Lake, BC, contains 93 unmarked child graves. They represent decades of abuse, systematic dehumanization, infanticide and sexual abuse of the residents of the nearby Sugarcane Reservation and other Indigenous peoples in the region. For Julian Brave NoiseCat and his father, Ed Archie NoiseCat, that history is their family’s history.

Sugar caneEmily Kassie and NoiseCat’s investigative documentary about the abuse and violence that took place at St. Joseph’s relentlessly examines previously unknown details about the systemic violence at the school and the concerted effort to hide it from the public. It is a painful documentary, but a deeply compassionate one, never shying away from the truths that have long been hidden, nor from the people complicit in hiding them.

It’s the first feature film for NoiseCat, a Salish historian, writer and filmmaker who lives in Bremerton, and the work is deeply personal, as his father was born at St. Joseph’s Mission. Sugar cane is about those who want to repair generations of harm, it is also a film about a father and son who go through this painful history together. This was not something the director took lightly, but he said it was necessary.

“It took me a while to actually work on a documentary about this subject, and then to participate in it in addition to directing,” NoiseCat said. “Ultimately, the reason I chose to not only direct but participate in the documentary was the actions of others, my own father’s interest in learning about his birth in particular.”

NoiseCat also said he was moved by the courage of Rick Gilbert, former chief of the Williams Lake First Nation, who died in 2023. For the film, Gilbert traveled to the Vatican and confronted a representative of the Catholic order that abused him and four generations of his family.

“That ultimately made me feel like if I, the son of the only known survivor of a pattern of child murder at St. Joseph’s Mission, wasn’t willing to go there with my family and my family’s story, I wasn’t going to give this documentary my best shot. And if there was any story or documentary in the world that deserved my best shot, this was it,” NoiseCat said.

For Kassie, who has a long history of investigative journalism and documentary filmmaking in newsrooms, telling this story as a feature film was uniquely important. “The camera, when used in the right way, can be a tool that empowers people, that gives them power, that makes them feel like they matter and tells them that they matter. In that way, it can really open people up and give them the strength to face these painful truths.”

Kassie and NoiseCat eschewed typical documentary conventions such as impersonal chatterboxes and invited participants to participate in the research itself. They had to build trust with everyone involved by demonstrating as a team that they were committed to telling their story accurately.

“From the beginning, (Kassie) and our cinematographer Chris (LaMarca) let people know that they were going to be there, that they were going to be all in on this story, and that they were going to do it in a compassionate, passionate way,” NoiseCat said. He said Kassie was present in the community for weeks, including moving in with Gilbert before he went to the Vatican. “(Kassie) and Chris really built that trust, because of the patience that they showed and the heart that they showed… Because we had three years to really do our very best, we were able to go at the pace of real human relationships and community. We didn’t have to push ourselves beyond what people were ready for.”

NoiseCat himself also benefited from their slow, deliberate approach. “Basically, the entire first year of filming, with a few exceptions, we didn’t film anything about my story or my family’s story, because I wasn’t ready at that point and I didn’t think my family was ready at that point,” he says.

Julian’s father was initially reluctant to investigate the family story, but in the film a road trip helps the two to confront their history. When we get to the point in Sugar cane where NoiseCat and his family are ready to talk openly about what happened, a conversation plays out as the camera pans to the horizon. The filmmakers felt it was right to give everyone the space to talk openly without feeling like the camera was intruding on the conversation and, as Kassie said, “to give people a quiet and intimate space to really engage.”

As for the photo of the sky they chose to accompany the conversation, Kassie said, “To us it looked like an open wound growing from dark to light. A kind of reopening.”

The film, which premiered at Sundance 2024 in January and won a special jury prize at this year’s Seattle International Film Festival, premieres tonight, August 23, at SIFF Uptown. As audiences begin to respond to the film, NoiseCat said he’s especially appreciative that Native audiences are sharing how they see their own family’s story in it. “Obviously this film has to do important educational work for all people in North America to understand what Indian Residential Schools and Native American Boarding Schools were, but I think it especially has to do that kind of work in Indian Country,” he said. “The generation that survived those schools is pretty old at this point. It’s usually our grandparents’ generation. I don’t know if we’ll ever really be able to reconcile with the government and the church that took our children and our land, but we absolutely have to be able to reconcile with ourselves as people and as communities and as families.”

NoiseCat says he hopes the film can be a catalyst for more investigations, with more institutional support for the First Nations people conducting them and then the survivors determining what reconciliation looks like. As for his own personal journey, NoiseCat said the experience of making the film is something he’ll carry with him forever.

“I will always be grateful that I got to go on that road trip with my father, that we got to have some of those conversations, that he got to have the conversation with his mother that he has in the film, and that our family, even though we are not ‘free,’ so to speak, of this history of Indian boarding schools, has found some healing and reconciliation in the process of trying to figure out what our story is and then sharing that story with others.”

Sugar cane will premiere Friday, August 23 at SIFF Cinema Uptown. Director Julian Brave NoiseCat will join a Q&A after the film after the 7:15 PM performance on Saturday, August 24.