Residential school doc ‘Sugarcane’ about ‘survival against all odds,’ says director

The Canadian Press Julian Brave NoiseCat initially didn’t want “Sugarcane” to be such a personal film. The Indigenous filmmaker says he intended to remain behind the camera for the Sundance prize-winning documentary, which he co-directed with Toronto’s Emily Kassie. The film is a quietly haunting account of deaths, rapes, suicides and missing children at the former St. Joseph’s Mission Residential School, a Catholic-run facility near Sugar Cane reserve in Williams Lake, B.C. But NoiseCat quickly realized the film would be incomplete if he and his family weren’t part of it. “My family had stories that cut to the core of the infanticide that happened at St. Joseph’s Mission,” NoiseCat, a member of the Canim Lake Band in British Columbia, says on a recent video call from Martha’s Vineyard, where he…

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