Academy Award-Nominated ‘Sugarcane’ Directors Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie On the Power of Testimony

“A camera tells people that they matter, that their stories matter, and that they deserve to be told in the greatest storytelling medium that humanity has come up with to date.”

With Sugarcane, their Academy Award-nominated feature documentary debut, directors Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie, craft a deeply intimate and cinematic portrait of a community reckoning with the enduring trauma of Canada’s Indian residential schools.

The film follows members of the Williams Lake First Nation community and investigators as they uncover unmarked graves near St. Joseph’s Mission, a former Catholic-run residential school. What began as an investigative documentary soon became deeply personal, revealing the community’s story and NoiseCat’s own family history.

Kassie, an Emmy and Peabody-nominated investigative journalist, first learned of the Williams Lake First Nation’s search through a local news article. A cold email to Chief Willie Sellars turned into a fateful phone call. “The Creator always has great timing,” Sellars told her. “Just yesterday, our council said we need someone to document this search.” Kassie reached out to her longtime friend NoiseCat, a journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times and The Washington Post, to collaborate on capturing the unfolding investigation. Neither of them expected just how close to home the story would hit—NoiseCat’s own father was abandoned as a baby in the school’s incinerator.

Refusing to frame the story as a relic of the past, Sugarcane moves beyond archival accounts, immersing audiences in the present-day search for truth and justice. “If we had approached this as a traditional talking-head documentary, it would have implied that these people and their stories belong to the past,” NoiseCat explains. “That was not the film we set out to make.”

The Sundance-winning documentary weaves together four distinct yet interconnected narratives within the Williams Lake community, balancing the weight of historical trauma with moments of resilience, culture, and love. With evocative editing by Nathan Punwar and Maya Daisy Hawke, and a stirring score by composer Mali Obomsawin, Sugarcane is a testament to survival, healing, and the power of storytelling.

NoiseCat and Kassie spoke with Awards Focus about the genesis of the documentary, earning the trust of community members, shaping the film’s intertwining narratives, and the collaborations that helped bring this vital and deeply personal story to life.

Awards Focus: What’s been the most surprising thing to you both to come out of this documentary, with the awards that it’s already received and the larger conversation that’s propelled by it?

Julian Brave NoiseCat: We just feel incredibly fortunate that this film has been part of and has helped drive a conversation that is both grassroots and has reached the highest decision-making offices in North America.

We brought the film to a reservoir and visited over a dozen Indigenous communities in Canada and the United States, where grandparents who survived the schools came to the screenings with their kids and their grandkids and started having conversations about one of the most buried stories of cultural genocide in North American history.

It’s truly a foundational story of this land that remains obscured to too many, including the people who survived it.

At the same time, we could never have dreamed that our film would screen in Canadian Parliament and the White House. That Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau would call it extremely impactful, that Joe Biden would write us a letter about how significant the film was, and that Barack Obama would include it on the list of his 10 favorite movies of 2024 as the only documentary on the list in a year with some incredible nonfiction films out there. We would get to do all this at the same time as the United States had its first-ever Native American cabinet secretary, my friend Deb Haaland, who attended the world premiere of our film as well as the White House screening and who’s been a real champion of this thing.

We just feel like the stars aligned for this project in so many different ways.

Emily Kassie: I’ll also say that this nomination for the film is incredibly meaningful to the community and, of course, to us, too, as a work of art.

It’s also historic. Julian is the first Indigenous North American filmmaker to ever be nominated for an Academy Award, which is breaking a massive, concrete ceiling for Indigenous artists and is really extraordinary.

The film has corrected the record and made something that was unknown, this foundational story of how the land of North America was taken forcibly by assimilating native children over six generations, which is incredible.

At the same time, we’re in a moment where imperialism is on the march again, and we are facing a political atmosphere in which children are being separated again at the border, where minorities are being disregarded as less useful and functional as the white populace. They’re dangerous ideas that have their roots from the inception of the country. We talk about the rise of authoritarianism today, but really, indigenous peoples have lived under authoritarianism, where they were forced onto tiny tracts of land and separated and unable to practice their language or culture.

So we can’t think of a more important time to be talking about this story for it to resonate with people, and just are incredibly grateful to the academy for giving it this sort of recognition.

AF: The film is so immersive as an audience member to see how everyone is responding to what’s going on as the investigation is unfolding. What was the genesis of the project, and then how did Julian come to be in front of the camera?

Kassie: I grew up in a community of Holocaust survivors and their descendants, and my mom worked in hospitals with Holocaust survivors. So that was really my framing of the world, and I really wanted to understand why we exact violence on one another, how we survive and what we do in the aftermath, and how silence can permeate through generations after suffering this sort of trauma.

So, I became an investigative journalist and documentary filmmaker, and I covered human rights abuses and conflicts all over the world, from Afghanistan to Niger, but had never turned the lens on my own country.

I was born and raised in Canada, and, of course, there were 139 of these schools in Canada and 417 in the United States, with the last one closing in 1997. When the news of potential unmarked graves broke, I felt gut pulled to this story and also compelled to reach out to my friend Julian.

Jules and I worked our first reporting jobs together a decade ago. We were randomly sat next to each other at the desk as cub reporters in a newsroom, and in the years since, Julian has gone on to become one of the best writers, thinkers, and journalists on Indigenous life in North America. He had this very unique perspective and an incredible voice and storytelling prowess that I thought would be really complimentary, so I reached out to him.

He told me he’d think about it, and I went looking for a nation that said they were going to do a search because it made sense to kind of film this as a narrative arc that followed a search. And then two weeks later, of course, I heard back from Julian when I was about to go.

NoiseCat: And when I called them back, you know, I said, “Hey, I’ve thought about it, and I’m open to collaborating with you.” I needed to take some time because I had just signed a book contract and I’d never written a book before and this is my first film and doing both at the same time felt a little ambitious and also, more to the point, as you see in the film, my family’s connection to the Indian residential school history is a very heavy and painful one. I wasn’t sure I was ready to touch that subject in any medium let alone one that I had never worked in before, and so I did take some time to think about it.

When I got back to Em and finally had come around to being open to it, that’s when she told me that she’d identified a First Nation that was leading a search, and that search was happening at Saint Joseph’s Mission near Williams Lake, BC. When she said that, I was completely shocked.

Then, I told her that that was the school that my family was sent to and where, to the best of my knowledge, my father was born, and that’s all I ever really knew.

So, out of 139 Indian residential schools across Canada, Em happened to choose to focus our documentary on the one school that my family was taken away to and where my father’s life began without even realizing that’s what she had done.

From that moment, we have felt that there were forces beyond ourselves that were part of bringing us together and driving forward the story and making sure it was told and told in the right way.

AF: How did you land on the verité style of documentary, and what kinds of equipment were you using for not just the intimate moments with the community but the landscapes too?

Kassie: We wanted the film to focus not only on the journalistic truth but the emotional truth of what it was to live in this moment, that this is not just a story of the past, but a story of the present where Indigenous communities are still suffering from the ramifications of these schools, with the highest rates of addiction and suicide and cycles of violence as a direct result of this forced family separation over a century.

So, the only way to do that was to shoot the film as a Verite film and live the story alongside our participants to gain their trust and be present for these massive moments, like Rick going all the way to the Vatican for the Pope’s apology, but also these really personal moments where we can feel the interiority and emotional changes in a participant over time.

We shot 160 days over two and a half years. I shot the film myself with [cinematographer] Chris Lamarca and we shot it two-camera for a good portion of it. Our ethos was to really at once capture the epic-ness and beauty of a world that was taken away and also the intimacy and landscapes of what lives on in the faces of our participants. So, one thing that we decided to do was shoot the film on prime lenses because on a prime lens, you can’t zoom in. You have to physically move your body to be close. If you watch the film, it’s very close,e and that can only happen through gaining an incredible amount of trust over time.

AF: Testimony itself can be so confronting, and then to have a camera put into that closeness as well, I can imagine for someone sharing their trauma would also be very confronting.

Having immersed yourself within the community like that, how did the trust and openness of victims and extensions of the community evolve over the course of filming? Were community members more receptive as it went on?

NoiseCat: Yeah, absolutely. I think, firstly, we could have never done this without the enthusiastic consent of the Williams Lake First Nation, who, as Em mentioned, wanted their search to be documented. It’s worth pointing out that it is an unusual choice for a community of survivors to make, as you see in the film. This is a history that has largely gone unspoken about, even among the very people who endured it. So, that was a really essential piece to our ability to make the film and to have done it the way that we have.

Having someone from the community direct was really helpful in gaining trust and access in certain moments. However, the camera can sometimes be imposing and requires people to get used to it. However, it can also be empowering.

For Indigenous people who have had our stories misrepresented for so long, whose stories are at the root of Hollywood, but in the worst way, with ourselves being portrayed as dying at the end of a gun pointed by a cowboy or at the root of documentary where they’re portrayed as people with a dying way of life. I think that there was something inherently incredibly empowering about our presence and about the way that Chris and Em conducted themselves in this community. We really did 160 shoot days, and there were many days when we weren’t shooting and were very present in the life of our participants in the overall life of the community to the extent that Em moved in with Rick for a couple of weeks before we went to the Vatican and would stay up late at night watching American Idol.

This is the place that my family comes from. I’m there a lot and probably will be buried there. I think that that also deeply shaped how we told the story. We set out to tell a story about the present consequences of these institutions and also the enduring beauty and life of these people. The only way to really do that was to be there and to document with the camera.

People in the community saw that, felt it, and responded accordingly. We are eternally grateful to all the many people who appeared on camera, their families, friends, supporters, and everyone else who has gotten behind this. We could have never anticipated how universally supportive the whole world has been.

Kassie: For me coming into a community that obviously is not my own, it was about building trust over time, about showing up for people with a lot of compassion and love and reciprocity. It’s about picking Chief Willie’s kids up from hockey practice when he needs that and going to community events and even attending funerals in the community for friends and for others who passed away, also in a kind of direct result of these schools. And over and over again, creating the space for the survivors to live their story in front of the camera as opposed to trying to extract something from them. Those relationships were very carefully thought through with a lot of love and respect.

AF: Narratively, it felt like your editors, Nathan Punwar and Maya Daisy Hawke, were working with probably hundreds of hours of footage.

Kassie: [laughs] Thousands!

AF: It felt like there were four intertwining stories, so how did you decide on those stories, and was there anything left on the cutting room floor that you wish had made it into the final cut?

NoiseCat: There’s so much that we wish could have made it. I think part of what was brilliant about the design of the documentary from the beginning is that Em showed up a week before I did. I’ve been going there my whole life, but she showed up at Williams Lake a week before I did and chose to follow an investigation, which gave us a very strong and clear narrative through line. Although we could have never anticipated that it was going to be an investigation that would end with the excavation of unmarked graves, of course, there was another darker and definitely unreported story unfolding about a pattern of infanticide wherein there were no graves, actually, and there would be no graves.

Ultimately, we could have never predicted also that that would intersect with the storylines of our characters, including the late chief for Gilbert and my own father. From the very first meeting, Em identified Chief Willie, Charlene Belleau, my aunt, and the late Chief Rick Gilbert as characters. The one storyline that was the last to join the four was my own story and my family’s story, which took a longer process of Em. I understood the film that we were setting out to make and how we were going to work together, and then ultimately, felt comfortable. My family felt comfortable with going there with our story, which took about a year or so into production.

But I made that choice because it felt like the right thing to do in many ways. It felt like the right way to convey the intergenerational nature of this trauma without ever having to use that five-dollar word. It also felt like the right way to choose to live this incredibly consequential part of my people’s and family’s history.

Here I was, the only son of the only known survivor of the incinerator at Saint Joseph’s mission, put in a position to help write the record about this school and about our people. To do that, I needed the trust of my father and the support of so many other people in my family.

I’m just so grateful that they did trust us and let us in and that it has been a huge healing thing for my father and my family because while that story is incredibly horrifying and exceptional in certain ways, it’s also representative of the story of many kids who did not come home, including some, based upon our investigation and reporting, who died as babies in that incinerator.

Kassie: As you can imagine, over several years of living this story together, we had a lot of ideas about the thrusts of the story and how we wanted to frame it. We wanted it to be a sort of reverse western. This is an old cow town on the Cariboo Gold Rush trail where there are rodeos, and there’s a lake, and on one side of the lake is the town, and the other side is the Res, and there are cowboys and Indians and Indian cowboys and like we wanted that texture to be in it. There was this idea that, at the beginning of a Western, a stranger comes to town, right? And that’s Julian coming back to this place where he didn’t grow up, but his family is trying to find answers.

We knew that there needed to be this drumbeat of an investigation. At first, there were like a seven character storyline, not four. We wanted the feeling of the Catholic Church to be present. There were so many ways in which we wanted to tell the story and we came to Nathan at first and then later Maya with all of these ideas.

And eventually, after about six months of watching footage, we came up with a five and a half hour cut that we loved. Unfortunately, it turns out movies can’t be that long unless you’re like Oppenheimer. So, it took another year of iterating and figuring out how to lose things with our incredible editors, Nathan and Maya, and how to weave and drop information, how much time you needed to spend with each character at each point to really move into the emotion with them and get under the skin. But it also did not linger too long that you lost the other threads, and that required a lot of experimenting and moving the dial on more investigation, less investigation, more emotional confrontations, and less of that.

And then there are these kind of beautiful interstitial moments in the film that we actually didn’t put in until the last couple weeks. That became the kind of fabric that tied the threads of those scenes together, those contemplative moments where you could see the rest of the world come alive, that feeling of the Western and that feeling of the town. It was an incredible journey with them, an incredible collaboration amongst artists, and very, very difficult as a miracle to pull off.

NoiseCat: I just want to add one other piece, which is that Em and Chris have now won awards for their cinematography. The images in this film and the way that they were edited together by Nathan and Maya, who just wanted an editing award today, were also a really essential part of what we were trying to say with this whole thing, which was that the Indian RESIDENTIAL schools were premised on the idea that native people were backward and dirty and ugly and that our way of life needed to die. Implicitly, by making a film that portrays these people in this place as beautiful and cinematic, that’s a direct refutation of that very awful history of colonization.

Kassie: And one more layer to that. Sorry, Matthew. It’s hard to stop talking once we’ve started. The film has an incredible score by Mali Obosawin. She’s an indigenous jazz musician. She can really do everything and is expanding into pretty much every genre of music. We went to her, and we were like, this needs to pull on the stylings of Johnny Cash and Neil Young, but it also has to have the choral and gospel sounds of the Catholic Church. It has to also pay homage to honor songs and each character needs to have a theme that changes over time.

She was like 26 or 27, super young and super brilliant, and was able to pull off what we think is an incredibly original and subtle score that really doesn’t tell you how to feel. All it does is underscore the currents in themes that are already unfolding in the film, and I think she just deserves such kudos for the incredible work she did.

It was really stunning.