“This Is a Community Living on the Edge of Death”: Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie Build Trust in ‘Sugarcane’

A film forged through traumatic reckoning, Sugarcane investigates the discovery of 50 unmarked graves on the property of St. Joseph’s, a now-defunct residential school in British Columbia located near the titular Sugarcane Reservation of Williams Lake. The bodies unceremoniously buried here are Native children that were forced to attend this institution, one of 139 in Canada that were predominantly affiliated with the Catholic Church, in an attempt to assimilate them to Western cultural values by way of rejecting their Indigenous roots. Abused at the hands of clergy and staff—with accounts of sexual, physical and psychological tortures recounted by survivors through vérité interviews—several students disappeared while enrolled at these schools, never to be seen or heard from again. With little support from law enforcement or the broader Canadian government, these communities began to collectively suppress the horrors they experienced as a coping mechanism. 

A scandal well-worth documenting in its own right, co-directors Julian Brave Noisecat and Emily Kassie explore the specificity of St. Joseph’s crimes through an intimately personal lens. NoiseCat’s father, Ed Archie, was actually born on the school’s grounds, found atop of a trash incinerator by a local delivery man. Several more babies were suspected of being burned alive to conceal clergymembers’ rampant rape of students; Ed Archie is the only baby born at St. Joseph’s known to have survived. Unable to get answers from NoiseCat’s kyé7e (grandmother), who finds the events of her son’s conception and birth too painful to revisit, Ed Archie and his son confront a complex family history—complete with abandonment issues, addiction and generational trauma—in hopes of bringing answers to a community deeply rattled by relatively recent evils. (For context, St. Joseph’s didn’t cease operation until 1981; the last residential school in Canada didn’t close until 1996.) 

A 2022 IDA Enterprise Documentary Fund Grantee and the winner of this year’s Directing Award: U.S. Documentary at Sundance, Sugarcane deftly explores how both pain and perseverance can travel through bloodlines. I spoke to NoiseCat and Kassie, longtime collaborators who met while working at the Huffington Post, via Zoom just days before their film’s U.S. theatrical rollout. From a hotel room in LA where “you can see the Hollywood sign from the window,” the co-directors discussed the inception of this collaboration, building trust with their subjects, and clandestinely shooting in the Vatican. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

DOCUMENTARY: When Emily first pitched the idea of collaborating on a project about Canadian residential schools, you were both surprised when it turned out that the film’s intended focus would be the same school where Julian’s father was born. How did you weave this personal connection into the film’s narrative? Was there any resistance there, Julian? 

JULIAN BRAVE NOISECAT: There was definitely resistance on my part to participate. I initially signed on as a director behind the camera, and even that decision was a challenging one. I had never made a film before and I was trying to write my first book. I knew that no matter what this film focused on specifically, it would be very intense for me. Then there was a fortuitous alignment of Emily choosing to follow the exact same school that my family was sent to and where my father was born. 

For the first year of production, I was only a collaborator behind the camera. I almost never appeared during filming. One of the only things we filmed during this time where I actually did appear—which did make its way into the documentary—was when my aunt Charlene brought us to the barns and performed that ceremony to ask me to help her tell this story. I would say that Charlene’s act of pulling me into the story was really true to how I ended up becoming a part of it. As the filming unfolded, it became increasingly clear that if I was going to do this in an emotionally present way, I would have to go there with my own family’s trauma and history connected to the residential schools. 

My dad’s birth was a story that existed in the community’s memory. We’d be explaining what we were doing [to community members] over the age of 60. I would say who I was, that so-and-so is my grandmother, and who my dad was. They would all clearly know something about that story, but I didn’t even know what the full story was. Obviously, this made me want to know even more, plus my dad has wanted answers about this for his entire life. My story was the last thing we filmed and the last thing we really figured out how to edit into the documentary. I feel that it was undoubtedly the right decision for my life, my family’s life, and probably the lives of my descendants, as well. 

D: Emily, what conversations did you have with Julian to make him feel comfortable sharing this personal element as a collaborator? 

EMILY KASSIE: When I first heard the news of potential graves in Kamloops, the first thing that I did was text Jules. Jules and I worked our first reporting jobs together, and I had really been trying to find a way to work with him ever since. He’s an incredible writer, as well as a journalist and thinker. He has such a key perspective as well as historical and cultural knowledge. But I had no idea that he was connected to this story. The day I called him up, I was about to start shooting, and he told me that I had picked the one school out of 139 where his kyé7e had attended and where his father was born. I was blown away, but I also didn’t think that it would be a part of the story, only because I knew that to both collaborate on and become a participant in the film would take an enormous amount of emotional labor. I never pushed him in any way to become a part of the story. 

One day, Charlene texted me and said, “Come to the barn, bring Julian, and bring your camera.” Holding the camera in that room—it was Julian, Charlene, myself, and our DP, Chris LaMarca, —felt like the world had broken open. It felt like there was this connection to something bigger. The story was choosing how it was going to be told and who it was going to be told by. Charlene also had her own designs, so it was so clear from that moment on that if Julian chose to do this, it would become so much more [impactful]. 

We’ve built an incredible friendship, first and foremost, and an incredible vision for what this film could be. What that looked like is after shooting, we would sit on the couch together and at night, eat a lot of snacks, and have this mind meld where Julian would share key perspectives, like, “This is a community living on the edge of death.” Jules attended 10 funerals during the making of this film and I attended several myself. This is a community that is still suffering through addiction and abuse from the legacy of residential schools. Then I could incorporate that into the way that I was moving with the camera, what I was picking up, and where we were following. As we built that trust over time, I think Julian also saw how I operated with other people. 

By the time we were a year in, Jules decided that he wanted to pursue this story. It kind of naturally unfolded from there. He knew that I had the fabric of the world baked into my lens. I understood what we were trying to get at.I shot most of the film on a prime lens. With a prime lens, you can’t zoom, so the only way to get close is by physically moving. The only way to do that in these types of spaces is if you’ve earned that trust and created a space for people where they didn’t just feel that they were submitting to being on camera. They wanted me to be riding along with them in these profound moments, and I think that speaks to the kind of agency you can create when you really commit to getting under the skin of something and living the story.

JBN: Part of my skepticism at the beginning probably came from the fact that I’m a writer by background. The way that writers work in nonfiction is very different from the way that documentarians work. I had never seen somebody going through their most traumatic memories with a camera right up in their face. The history of documentary, in part, begins with films like Nanook of the North, which was a largely fabricated documentary about the Inuit as these primitive people who were about to get steamrolled by colonization and modernity. Of course, this was not the actual truth that the filmmaker encountered when he went to the north, but it constructed this image of Indigenous peoples that enabled them to be ruled over by white people. 

Em is right, though. When we filmed this funeral for a young man who committed suicide, I was like, “Does anybody else see how strange this feels?” People were going about their business as though we were not there. Then I came to understand that the camera isn’t inherently a tool of domination. The camera can also say to people that you matter, that your story matters, that your perspective matters, that people deserve to hear from you and understand your humanity. A huge part of that is, obviously, who the people behind the camera are. A huge part of that was the fact that Em and our director of photography, Chris LaMarca, connected with the Sugarcane community and the lives of our participants and came to be loved by many, many people. 

In addition to filming, Em was helping pick up [protagonist Willie Sellars’s] kids from practice. Almost every single shot of me in the film, and certainly of my kyé7e, except for one, comes from Em and her camera. That was because of the trust and relationship that she built with those people. Obviously, Em and Chris are not Native, but part of what people respond to when they watch the film is that it was made from the heart and done from a place of incredibly deep and trusting collaboration. 

D: What was the experience of interacting with the Catholic Church, an institution that’s carried out so much genocidal violence yet is still revered by some of those who were actively persecuted? 

EK: I’ll start by talking about the late Chief Rick Gilbert. I think one of the reasons we were so drawn to Rick, besides the fact that he’s an amazing storyteller, is that he was wrestling with these ideas of faith and indigeneity. Julian’s kyé7e is still a practicing Catholic. Rick is a practicing Catholic. There are many elders of that generation who hold the church very close to them. That’s complicated, but it’s also very real for them. Rick was wrestling with this idea of identity, yet he continued to hold the religion very close to him. We were really drawn to the nuance of reckoning with those things. Rick can go all the way to the Vatican and confront this priest of the Catholic order [that abused him] and find emptiness in his words and from the Pope’s apology, yet still want both a Catholic funeral that a bishop presided over as well as a funeral on the res. 

Our access to the Vatican was quite complicated, as was dealing with the Catholic Church. It is incredibly difficult for communities trying to investigate what happened at other schools. The Catholic Church has only just begun to start opening up their records. As Rick says, the Pope’s apology is not enough. There has to be action, and part of that action is allowing people to access the truth. We had an incredibly hard time getting access on that trip to various events and to the Pope meeting. So we wanted the film’s visual language to represent the hollowness of these bastions of empire—of these symbols of colonialism and the church—but really show it from Rick’s POV. I shot the Sistine Chapel out of focus. The Pope is out of focus. As Rick moves through the Vatican Museum, he ends up seeing the stolen artifacts from his own land and people, and that’s when the film comes into focus—while he has this direct reckoning with the church. 

JBN: During the Vatican sequence, right after you see all of these pilfered artifacts—the Catholic Church’s empire of loot from the Indigenous world—the last image that you see is a pictograph that is representative of the trickster coyote from the mythology of my people, of all Interior Salish peoples. He helped the creator make the world, but he did it through subterfuge and a lot of fairly scandalous things by modern standards. He was often stealing things. That image brings us back to the world of Sugarcane, because in the next shot, you’re at the Williams Lake Stampede. It is a commentary on the theft of the Catholic Church as well as a commentary on the process of making the film, because the way we had to go about filming the Vatican, as you might imagine, was not exactly endorsed by the church. 

We wanted to deal with the actual complexity of real people. I think that the church is the most clear example of this, but I think my father is another example. He has been dealing with the wounds of natal abandonment for his entire life, yet he’s gone on to not be a present father in the lives of both of his children. It’d be easy to tell a story of people rejecting the church and embracing their traditions. It’d be easy to tell a story about people getting over their histories and becoming heroes. But the truth always falls somewhere between. 

D: Will both continue to collaborate creatively in the future, whether it be another film or journalistic project? 

EK: When the right project comes along for us to collaborate on, as it did with this one, we will. In the immediate future, I’m going to work on my next doc, which I think will take me overseas. I have been reporting on and making films about human rights abuses around the world, so I move from project to project as it pulls me. 

JBN: I’m editing my first book. It’s nonfiction and called We Survived the Night. It will be published by Knopf in North America next year. It’s a combination of memoir, family history and journalism, but it’s told in the form of a coyote story. Essentially, my people trace our lineage back to the trickster and I see a lot of the trickster in my father and his father. I also see a lot of wisdom in the trickster narrative’s way of looking at and explaining the world and why it is the way it is. My background is writing, so I imagine I’ll continue that, which also takes a little bit less capital. 

This has been a really special collaboration, especially between me and Em, but also between the rest of our team. That experience of creative collaboration and working on a film has made me want to continue doing that. Right now, I’m developing a script with Erica Tremblay, who directed Fancy Dance, about a father-son haunting. It’s a horror script and we’re hopeful that we can get something going on that front this fall. 

D: I was going to ask you about your book, particularly how making this film while developing your book may have influenced both projects. 

JBN: Yeah, they really influenced each other. I lived with my dad during production and also during the writing of the book. In addition to the road trip, me and him were hanging out all the time. I was sitting around hearing his stories, many of which I had never really heard before because I didn’t grow up with him. 

Sugarcane is, in a lot of ways, about the near-annihilation of a way of life and worldview. That made me really think about what it would be to recover your culture, your traditions, your language. We Survived the Night is in conversation with this, in part because it touches on some of the same subjects, but it’s also about recovering a particular narrative and artistic tradition that was thrown in the wastebasket of history and said to be primitive. What I’m saying in the book is that there is a very rich tradition here that deserves to live alongside literary traditions of people across the world. It’s really an act of recovering a steamrolled tradition that was nearly dead.

Natalia Keogan is a critic and journalist based in NYC. Her bylines include Filmmaker Magazine, A.V. Club, Reverse Shot, and Paste, amongst others.