
Oscar-nominated actress Lily Gladstone has boarded the award-winning documentary Sugarcane as executive producer.
From first-time director and TIME100 Next honoree Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emmy®- and Peabody-nominated investigative journalist, director, producer and cinematographer Emily Kassie, Sugarcane is an epic, nuanced and sensitive cinematic portrait of a community during a moment of international reckoning. Amidst the groundbreaking investigation into abuse and deaths at an Indian residential school in Canada, the film’s courageous participants break cycles of intergenerational trauma by facing painful, long-ignored truths and rebuilding broken family bonds.
Raised on the Blackfeet Reservation, Gladstone is of Piegan Blackfeet, Nez Perce and European heritage. Gladstone was the first Native American to win the Golden Globe® Award for Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama and be nominated for the Academy Award® for Best Actress for their work in “Killers of the Flower Moon.”
Previously, Gladstone was honored at 2023’s Variety’s Power of Women event for her work as an advocate for Indigenous women’s rights. The actor works closely with the National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center (NIWRC), a nonprofit that aims to end violence against Indigenous women. The NIWRC has created a database that allows individuals to search for legislation regarding missing and murdered Indigenous women across states.
“You’re not going to find any Indigenous person in North America, Canada, the US, elsewhere, or really Indigenous people worldwide that didn’t go through some kind of program like this,” Gladstone told Vanity Fair. “My grandmother, who I lived with from age 11 until she passed away two summers ago—she’s a boarding school survivor. I don’t know if my grandmother ever allowed for that space to open up enough for her to heal from it. I think she was surviving from whatever it was she witnessed,” Gladstone said. Adding of the film, “There’s no mincing words. There’s nothing edited out. You’re talking to survivors and you’re confronting that grief and you’re confronting that reality in a way that needs to be done because it’s a hard thing for people to palate.”
After making its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year — where it won the U.S. Documentary Competition Directing Award — the film went on to receive the Center for Documentary Studies Filmmaker Award from the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival and the 2024 Filmmaker Award from the Margaret Mead Film Festival. To date, Sugarcane has won 17 awards, including Best Documentary Feature awards from Mountainfilm, the San Francisco International Film Festival, the San Luis Obispo International Film Festival and the Sarasota Film Festival, along with Special Jury Prizes at the Seattle International Film Festival and the International Film Festival of Boston.
Sugarcane opened theatrically in the U.S. in August 2024 and will stream later this year on Hulu and Disney+. This week, the film was nominated for eight Critics Choice Awards — the most of any film — including Best Director, Best New Documentary Filmmakers, Best Cinematography, Best Editing, Best Historical Documentary, Best Political Documentary, Best True Crime Documentary, and Best Documentary Feature.
Alongside the film’s theatrical release, the filmmakers have conducted a screening tour of First Nations and Tribal communities across North America. These “Rez Tour” screenings offer Indigenous communities an accessible, intimate and safe way to watch the film prior to its streaming release. Each screening is organized in coordination with First Nations and Tribal community leaders and highlights local or regional resources and health support for Indigenous Peoples and families who have been impacted by residential schools in Canada and Indian boarding schools in the United States. The Sugarcane “Rez Tour” began just weeks after the Department of the Interior released its most recent Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative Investigative Report, which found that nearly 1,000 children died at the more than 400 schools funded by the U.S. federal government.