CWC Docs: Sugarcane

A stunning tribute to the resilience of Native people and their way of life, the Academy Award-nominated Sugarcane is an epic cinematic portrait of a community during a moment of international reckoning. In 2021, evidence of unmarked graves was discovered near an Indian residential school in Canada, sparking a national outcry about the forced separation, assimilation, and abuse that children experienced at the hands of the Church and government. When journalist and filmmaker Emily Kassie asked her old friend and colleague Julian Brave NoiseCat to direct a film documenting the Williams Lake First Nation investigation of St. Joseph’s Mission, she never imagined how close this story was to his own family.

Even as it peers into the legacies of abuse and death at an Indian residential school, Sugarcane empowers participants to break cycles of intergenerational trauma by bearing witness to painful, long-ignored truths, and the love that endures within their families.

Following the screening, Caitlin Keliiaa (author of Refusing Settler Domesticity: Native Women’s Labor and Resistance in the Bay Area Outing Program) will join moderator Alex Lilburn (Film and Media Studies, UCSB) for a discussion about Sugarcane and the legacy of the boarding school system.