‘Sugarcane’ directors receive Oscar nomination with documentary on boarding schools, hope and healing
Sexual assault at Catholic-run boarding school: ‘The ones telling us it was a sin, they were the ones that did all the action’
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Julian Brave NoiseCat, co-director of the Oscar-nominated documentary Sugarcane, attends the premiere of Free Leonard Peltier at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. NoiseCat’s film won the U.S. Documentary Directing Award. (Photo credit/ Jodi Rave Spotted Bear)
Filmmakers Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie deftly cut through decades of deceit to unravel the truth on the often deadly abuse of Indigenous children – and infants born in secret – who attended a religious boarding school. They bring a hard-to-imagine world to life through their lens in the Oscar-nominated film “Sugarcane.”
The film premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival and this year secured an Academy Award nod for best documentary. The Oscar show is scheduled for Sunday, March 2, making NoiseCat the first known North American Indigenous filmmaker to receive the nomination. The film’s strengths stem from investigative reporting, cinematic beauty, and the stories of survivors of the St. Joseph Mission school near Williams Lake, British Columbia.
The film’s visual bursts elicit both light and darkness in a film that chronicles the physical, sexual and emotional abuse of kids who were supposed to be receiving an education at the Catholic-run boarding school. This is a story of those who witnessed and lived through the experience and now share what happened to them as they process of lifetime of grief and healing.
While NoiseCat’s film premiered last year at Sundance, he attended the festival in January, where film goers attended the sold-out “Free Leonard Peltier” 2025 premiere. On his Oscar nomination, NoiseCat told me he was honored to follow the path of the filmmakers and storytellers before him.
“I also think that this is an important moment for this story to be known, especially here in the United States, where it has gone unrecognized and untold for so long,” he said. “There was a cultural genocide that was perpetrated against the first peoples of this land.”
“Sugarcane” breaks that story open. It gives many of the survivors a first-time chance to confront the past and take steps to heal from immense pain and hurt caused by priests and nuns assigned to educate them in a boarding school system operated near the traditional homelands in Canada. While some children who died had proper burials, hundreds of unmarked graves have been discovered at several locations through advanced technology.
“At the same time as these schools were open, Hollywood was portraying Native people dying on the far side of the frontier at the end of a fake gun pointed by John Wayne,” NoiseCat said. “There’s a historic opportunity here to, maybe not right the wrong, but to correct the record.”
The documentary has no shortage of shocking stories on missing and murdered Indigenous children. Some were infants, the babies of young girls impregnated by priests at the St. Joseph’s Mission. Many children across several generations attended the residential school from the nearby Sugarcane Reserve.
In one film scene, NoiseCat talks with a St. Joseph survivor, Jean William, who spoke of the strict Catholic rules thrust upon students. The priests spoke about the evils of sin. “The ones telling us it was a sin, they were the ones that did all the action,” said William.
NoiseCat, who is also a journalist, credits his inspiration for truthful storytelling not only to past filmmakers but also to his aunt Charlene Belleau, also a St. Joseph school survivor. Unlike many, she’s not been silent. She’s been a staunch advocate for truth and reconciliation in Canada for the last 35 years.
The Indigenous movement seeks ongoing investigations, including access to institutional records and data from former residential schools. Similar efforts for reconciliation are underway in the United States, which has nearly four times the number of boarding schools than in Canada. Former Interior Secretary Deb Haaland led the launch of the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative in 2024 to address the troubled legacy of 417 U.S. boarding schools.
In “Sugarcane,” Belleau and NoiseCat stand in the attic of a large barn where St. Joseph students carved their names into exposed barn board siding. Belleau said the nuns and priests called students by their assigned numbers, not their names. She was number 165. In the film, visibly shaken, she tells her filmmaker nephew how students would be hoisted from three poles in the barn attic and lashed “until they passed out.”
As she talks to NoiseCat, Belleau burns sage from a cast iron skillet. “Our elders are now looking to you to listen to our stories,” she said. “You are bearing witness to a time in history where our people are going to stand up. You’re gonna make sure that people are held accountable for everything they’ve done to us.”
“Sugarcane” is streaming on Hulu and Disney+.
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