Oakland filmmaker's devastating doc tells story of covered-up atrocity

“Sugarcane,” co-directed by Emily Kassie and Oakland-raised Julian Brave NoiseCat, is a devastating documentary, containing images and words sure to sear the souls of anyone who comes into contact with it.

But this is not to say that it’s unwatchable. Kassie and NoiseCat have gifted us a film that finds compassion and tenderness arising from the atrocities, like flowers sprouting from cracks in the concrete.

Opening Friday at the Landmark Opera Plaza, “Sugarcane” begins in 2021, when evidence of many unmarked graves was discovered in Canada on the site of St. Joseph’s Mission , a residential school that closed in 1981.

This school, like hundreds of others in Canada and in the United States, was where, in a thoroughly racist move, Indigenous children were forcibly sent to be assimilated into white culture. It was an attempt to solve, in the parlance of the time, “the Indian problem.”

The schools were run by the Catholic Church. There was abuse of many kinds by both nuns and priests. Children were born and some were incinerated. Older children died by suicide or while trying to escape, and everything was covered up.

In other words, the Indigenous peoples were taught about sin by day, and sinned against by night.

NoiseCat's own father, Ed, was one of the children born at a residential school, and the film shows, in fearless, intimate conversations between father and son, how damaging it was for him.

During an argument, the younger NoiseCat points out that his father was both abandoned, and an abandoner. When the time came to step up for his son, Ed wasn’t there. Ed breaks down in tears, admitting that he was lost in a fog of alcohol, perhaps as a result of his trauma.

Yet “Sugarcane” is not only about atrocity. There are attempts at making amends. We see a speech of acknowledgement by Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau , which feels a bit like “thoughts and prayers.”

A more powerful tangent occurs when Chief Rick Gilbert learns through a DNA test that he was descended from a priest. He's invited to Rome to meet the Pope as a kind of official apology. That, too, feels like a letdown.

Meanwhile, investigators Whitney Spearing and Charlene Belleau are doing the hard work, making phone calls and digging in the dirt, to find the truth.

In one scene, they explore an old barn and find names carved into the wood, the names of Indigenous youth going back decades. It’s a disquieting moment.

Between the broken survivors, who are perhaps unwilling or unable to talk, and the Catholic Church, which is very much unwilling to talk, it is understandably difficult to gather much information or evidence of this kind of wrongdoing. There's no Big Picture.

Nevertheless, “Sugarcane” gathers, piece by piece, bit by bit, enough to make a damning suggestion.

Where the film becomes more than just another hand-wringing documentary, however, is in the depiction of NoiseCat and his father today. NoiseCat participates in a dance contest in a large, joyous Indigenous festival, father and son swim together, they take drives, and eat meals.

Someone else’s crime does not make them who they are.

The film is deliberately paced, giving us time to digest the material. It defies more traditional documentary techniques. There are conversations rather than interviews. There is reporting, but no hard findings. It never flinches from horror, but it also knows how to find wonder.

It’s a visual film that observes, absorbs, and lets things sink in.

As with many difficult films, this one is a must-see for a simple reason: forewarned is forearmed. Thinking that “it can’t possibly happen here” is what actually causes inhumanity to happen.

Anyone who sees this film will carry around that knowledge, but they will also carry around the faces of the human beings within, human beings who endure.