National Geographic Documentary Films revealed the official trailer for Sugarcane, the documentary film that uncovers a dark legacy of cultural erasure and abuse at a Catholic boarding school for indigenous children in Canada
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 over a dozen awards, including Best Documentary Feature Awards from Mountainfilm, the San Francisco International Film Festival, the San Luis Obispo International Film Festival and Sarasota Film Festival, along with Special Jury Prizes at the Seattle International Film Festival and the International Film Festival of Boston.
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 will be released by Variance Films in the U.S. and by Films We Like in Canada on August 9 and will stream later this year on Hulu and Disney+.
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.
In 2021, unmarked graves were discovered around Canadian church-run boarding schools, belatedly exposing the hundred-year efforts to strip First Nations children of their culture and identity: Indigenous languages were banned, children were separated from their families and abused, and some disappeared. Sugarcane begins with a First Nation investigation at St. Joseph’s Mission school near the Sugarcane Reservation in British Columbia.
With tremendous empathy, co-directors Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie (winners of the Sundance Directing award) document the lucid, intimate memories of survivors of the school — including a leading advocate/investigator; a former tribal chief who is still a practicing Catholic; and NoiseCat’s own father and grandmother, whose tragic story went unspoken for years.
Watch the official trailer for Sugarcane.
The following theaters will be showing Sugarcane:
New York – Film Forum – An exclusive engagement begins Aug. 9
Toronto – TIFF Lightbox – An exclusive engagement begins Aug. 9
Los Angeles – Laemmle Royal – An exclusive engagement begins Aug. 16
San Francisco – Landmark Opera Plaza – begins Aug. 16