![]() ![]() ![]() The pope sounds truly sorry for what happened to Gilbert and other students at St. Gilbert winds up being invited to the Vatican for a meeting between Pope Francis and Indigenous Canadians. Joseph’s - and suspecting his father may have been one of the priests - and even takes it upon himself and his wife Anna to protect religious items from his church after hearing about the aforementioned arson epidemic. It’s one of several moments in the documentary that could drive sympathetic viewers to shout curses at the screen.Īnother major figure in “Sugarcane”: Rick Gilbert, former chief of Williams Lake First Nation, who has somehow held true to his Catholic faith despite witnessing the atrocities at St. At one point, Belleau actually makes phone contact with one of the school’s surviving priests, only to be politely but quickly brushed off before the call abruptly ends. John’s, despite scant support from government agencies and the understandable reluctance of former students to testify. Two individuals involved with the investigation, Charlene Belleau and Whitney Spearing, doggedly pursue leads and piece together evidence to document the full extent of the crimes against humanity at St. The documentary also follows the investigation launched by Williams Lake First Nation people after the 2021 discovery of more than 200 potential unmarked graves of Indigenous children at the site of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School - which was followed by a dramatic uptick in Church fires attributed to arson - and the 2022 discovery of 50 such graves outside the cemetery at St. Their emotional reconciliation is just one of the narrative threads employed by “Sugarcane” to tell its deeply moving story of evil and its aftermath. Ed, NoiseCat’s father, barely escaped such a dreadful fate his knowledge of that early brush with death is rendered here as a festering trauma that has long colored the strained relationship between father and son. ![]() We hear of priests sexually abusing male and female students, fathering children with helpless girls and sometimes disposing of unwanted (and incriminating) babies by tossing them into incinerators. “Sugarcane” meticulously details through testimonials and archival material how countless students died while trying to escape, or by committing suicide. Joseph’s ranked among the worst of the worst. Operated by Catholic priests and nuns, who often were unwaveringly demanding to the point of fanatical sadism, the most infamous of these schools were little better than prison camps. The school, which did not close until 1981, was one of many state-supported institutions - 139 in Canada, 408 in the United States - operated for more than a century to deal with “the Indian problem” by more or less brainwashing children into forgoing their Native languages and customs, and becoming acceptably assimilated. ![]() Joseph’s - including NoiseCat’s father and grandmother - who only gradually dredge up memories they obviously have long sought to suppress. But their disciplined approach to their material actually makes the movie even more effective in its cumulative impact, especially during interviews with survivors of St. Joseph’s Mission residential school near the Sugarcane Reservation of Williams Lake in British Columbia. It’s altogether likely that many non-Indigenous people knew nothing about the abuse and disappearances of Native American children that occurred over decades in residential Indian schools throughout North America until those outages inspired a wrenchingly potent subplot last year for the Taylor Sheridan-produced TV series “1923.” But the truth behind that fact-based fiction is even more shocking, and infuriating, as detailed in “ Sugarcane,” the remarkable film that received a well-deserved jury prize for documentary direction at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.Ĭo-directors Emily Kassie and Indigenous filmmaker Julian Brave NoiseCat show restraint and empathy while cataloguing the horrors that were endemic at the now-shuttered St. ![]()
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