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FunTranscript
00:00I'm Matt Carey, documentary editor at Deadline.com.
00:03We have for you now, Sugarcane,
00:05the Oscar nominated documentary feature
00:08directed by Julian Brave Noisecat and Emily Cassie.
00:12Thank you so much for being with us.
00:14Thanks for having us, Matt.
00:15It's good to see you as always.
00:17Thanks, Matt.
00:18It's about our like sixth conversation at this point.
00:20Something like that.
00:21I mean, I feel like I've been along for the ride
00:24starting a year ago at Sundance where the film premiered.
00:27It was then acquired
00:28by National Geographic Documentary Films.
00:31And this is really an extraordinary investigation
00:34that you undertake into an Indian residential school
00:37in British Columbia where there were just decades
00:40of really extraordinary abuse, forced separation,
00:43forced assimilation of indigenous children
00:47who attended that school.
00:49This is all under the direction of, in this case,
00:52the Canadian government and religious authorities,
00:55specifically the Catholic church.
00:57Before we get into some questions,
01:00let's take a look at a clip from Sugarcane.
01:02This begins with Chief Willie Sellers
01:05of the Williams Lake First Nation
01:07and also Charlene Bellew who's for years
01:11has been trying to get an investigation
01:13into unmarked, apparent unmarked graves
01:17on the grounds of the St. Joseph's Mission School
01:21in British Columbia.
01:22Let's take a look at that clip.
01:25♪♪
01:33♪♪
01:41♪♪
01:47Every principal from the time the place opened
01:50to when it closed all knew that this stuff was happening.
01:55So all of those principals were involved in some way
01:58with the disappearance, with the death,
02:01with the babies being born.
02:03♪♪
02:11♪♪
02:15Did they think we'd be stupid all of our lives,
02:18the rest of our lives,
02:21that nobody would ever find out these things?
02:23♪♪
02:30♪♪
02:35Well, Emily, this film began a number of years ago.
02:40You and Julian had known each other.
02:43You wanted to look into these
02:45so-called Indian residential schools,
02:48hundreds of them in Canada,
02:49hundreds more in the United States.
02:52Can you talk a little bit about the origins of the film?
02:56Yeah, absolutely, Matt.
02:57You know, I'm a documentarian and an investigative journalist.
03:01I've spent a career looking at human rights abuses
03:05and conflicts all over the world,
03:07from Niger to Afghanistan,
03:08but I had never turned my lens on my own country.
03:11I'm born and raised in Canada and, you know,
03:15knew next to nothing about the residential schools,
03:18even though the last one closed in 1997.
03:21This is such a present history
03:22that I learned virtually nothing about.
03:24And so when the news broke of potential unmarked graves
03:27on the grounds of one of those schools,
03:30I felt gut-pulled to this story.
03:33I felt like this was the place in the world I needed to be
03:36to follow one of these searches from its onset.
03:39And the other thing I felt I needed to do
03:42was reach out to my friend Julian,
03:45and that's because Jules and I
03:46worked our first reporting jobs together almost a decade ago.
03:50We were sat randomly next to each other
03:52as cub reporters in a New York newsroom.
03:54And in the years since, Julian had gone on
03:57to become an incredible writer, journalist, and thinker,
04:01focusing on indigenous life in North America.
04:05And so it seemed like a really natural collaboration.
04:08And, you know, my own family history
04:11is connected to the Holocaust.
04:13And I grew up in a community of survivors.
04:15My mom worked in hospitals with survivors.
04:17And so I kind of understood that there were these silences
04:21that permeated through generations of trauma
04:23that I was specifically interested in.
04:26Anyways, I asked Julian if he would be willing
04:29to work together on something,
04:31and he said he'd think about it.
04:33And in the meantime, I went looking for a nation
04:35that said they were gonna do a search,
04:37found this article in the Williams Lake Tribune
04:39about Chief Willie Sellers, sent him a cold email,
04:42and he called me back that exact afternoon.
04:44I was just rereading the email yesterday
04:47where he said he would give me a call.
04:49And he said to me,
04:51the creators always had great timing.
04:53Just yesterday, our council said
04:55we need someone to document this search.
04:58So with that, I talked to council.
05:00I got my gear together.
05:01And two weeks later, I was ready to go to Williams Lake.
05:04And that's when I heard back from Jules.
05:07And when I finally got back to Em,
05:09it really was two weeks later.
05:11I had a couple considerations.
05:12The first was that I had just signed a book contract
05:15and I'd never written a book before.
05:16And this is my first film, so I'd never done that either.
05:20And doing both at the same time
05:21felt a little bit ambitious, let's put it that way.
05:25And also, and this is probably more to the point,
05:27my family had a very intense connection
05:30with the Indian residential schools.
05:32And I wasn't sure if I was ready to touch that story
05:35in any medium, let alone one that I'd never worked in before.
05:39So I did take a little while to think about it.
05:41And after a couple of weeks, speaking to some family
05:45and some people who I really trusted,
05:47I told Em that I'd be open to collaborating with her
05:50on such projects.
05:51And that's when she told me that she'd identified
05:53this First Nation that was leading a search.
05:55And that that search was happening at St. Joseph's Mission
05:59near Williams Lake, British Columbia.
06:01And when she said that, I was completely shocked.
06:05I had to make sure that I heard her correctly
06:08because of course, that's the school
06:10that my family was sent to and where my father was born.
06:14So out of 139 Indian residential schools across Canada,
06:19Em happened to choose to focus our documentary
06:23on the one school that my family was taken away to
06:26and where my father's life began
06:28without even realizing that that's what she had done.
06:32The story you tell is very wide ranging
06:38in the sense that it incorporates so many schools
06:42or the issue pertains to so many schools
06:44in the U.S. and Canada.
06:46And Jillian, as you were saying, so very personal.
06:49And maybe you could talk about that a little bit,
06:51that your grandmother attended there.
06:53She's one of the many, many indigenous children
06:57who were separated from their families,
06:58forced to attend there.
06:59The whole purpose of these schools explicitly
07:03was to deny and destroy the indigenous culture
07:07of these children,
07:08but the abuse went much further than that.
07:11There, as you would discover in your investigation,
07:13there's systemic sexual abuse of children, beatings.
07:18It's really a horrifying kind of situation there.
07:22But can you talk about how you eventually decided
07:25to incorporate your story and your relationship,
07:29both with, especially with your father
07:32and to some degree with your grandmother into the story?
07:35Virtually every native family from Canada,
07:37as well as the United States,
07:39my family was deeply impacted
07:41by the Indian residential schools,
07:43as they're called in Canada.
07:45In the U.S., they call them
07:45the Native American boarding schools.
07:48These were institutions that were actually founded
07:50in the U.S. with the idea to, quote,
07:53kill the Indian and save the man,
07:55in the words of one of their original architects.
07:58And for over 150 years, about six generations,
08:02native children were forcibly separated
08:05from their families and sent to these schools
08:06to be assimilated into white and Christian society.
08:11The Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission
08:13has described this as a cultural genocide.
08:16It's one of the most significant foundational chapters
08:19in North American history,
08:21and yet people have heard very little about it,
08:23especially in the United States,
08:26especially, I would say, even in Hollywood,
08:29where at the same time,
08:30as children were being taken away to these institutions,
08:34the art of Hollywood was being built on Westerns
08:36that portrayed Native people dying at the end of a gun,
08:40wielded by a cowboy,
08:42when documentary, the art of documentary,
08:44was founded with depictions of indigenous peoples
08:47as primitives who were ignorant of modernity
08:50and whose way of life was destined to die.
08:54So this was a really far-reaching cultural genocide
08:58that our own art form is, to a certain extent, implicated in.
09:02So thinking about that,
09:04being a person from this overlooked history
09:09of cultural assimilation, erasure, and massive abuse
09:14that has not been talked about even among our own families,
09:18and then approaching that in an art form
09:21that has not been particularly kind to Native people.
09:24If you look at any Hollywood portrayal of an Indian,
09:27you're gonna cringe in this day and age, for the most part.
09:32So that was a really daunting task,
09:35and especially one where I also had to fuel out
09:37my relationship with my friend and collaborator.
09:39We were buddies, but we'd never ever worked together before.
09:43And so I did take a good amount of time
09:45at the beginning of the project
09:46to really sort through how I felt about that
09:50and how we could go about doing something that hefty
09:54in the right way.
09:55And part of what I did was I chose, actually,
09:57to move back in with my dad,
10:00a man who left when I was a small child,
10:04who I hadn't lived with since I was six or seven years old.
10:10At the age of 28, as a first-time filmmaker and author,
10:14I guess, I decided to move into the same house as him
10:18and live across the hall.
10:20And through that experience,
10:22being very clear that he had these questions
10:25about the circumstances surrounding his birth,
10:29as well as his upbringing,
10:31which themselves went back to our family's experience,
10:35and his mother in particular, her experience
10:37at St. Joseph's Mission, the Indian residential school
10:40that our family was sent to.
10:42And here I was with my own complicated relationship
10:45to my dad that was in large part caused by that history
10:51of, again, family separation.
10:54And I was in a position to help him sort through that,
10:56and in so doing, to help myself sort through
11:00my own questions of my relationship to my father
11:02and my culture and all those sorts of things.
11:05And ultimately, it felt like the appropriate way
11:08to go about living that portion of my life
11:12was actually to live it in my community
11:16and to help tell this story, as you see in the film,
11:20my aunt, Charlene Bellew, kind of asks me to help do.
11:23And ultimately, I felt like that was
11:25not only the right decision creatively,
11:27I think that it made our film a heck of a lot better,
11:30but it was also the right decision, more importantly,
11:34from a personal and familial perspective.
11:37Well, it's deeply moving.
11:38And Emily, maybe you could talk about an extraordinary scene
11:42in the film where you visit a,
11:45I don't know if one would call it a dormitory exactly,
11:48but it's where these indigenous children slept.
11:51It's kind of a barn-like structure,
11:54wooden beams in a sort of attic-like,
11:57and what you found there.
11:59Yeah, so the barns were actually places
12:02where the kids would, they kind of had dual purposes.
12:06One, well, actually three purposes.
12:08One is that these schools were working branches
12:13in many ways.
12:14The kids were used as child labor.
12:16And so there were, you know, they were dealing
12:18with livestock and all of those kinds of things.
12:20But the top of the barn is a place
12:22where kids would go hide out.
12:24Down below, they would be taken and strapped to poles
12:27and brutally beaten until they passed out.
12:30And so this was a place of both horror,
12:33forced labor, and of refuge.
12:36And when you take the ladder up to those kind
12:39of lofted rafts of the barns,
12:41what you find on the walls is etchings of children,
12:45children dating back to 1917,
12:48where they would mark their names,
12:50what reservation they came from.
12:53And in some cases, they would count down the days
12:57until they could go home.
12:58And we found many of those markings
13:00that said 137 days more till home time.
13:03We also found messages that they would send each other.
13:05Like one said, I don't care about Lucy's baby,
13:08which is foreshadowing of what we uncovered
13:11about some of the babies that were born
13:14at St. Joseph's Mission.
13:16But the barns hold a very particular power
13:18because one of the central kind of ideas
13:20behind Sugarcane is this question of what happens
13:23when the ghosts come home to tell the story.
13:25And it's here in these barns
13:26and these remaining structures of the mission
13:29that some of those spirits still live.
13:31And you can kind of feel that when Charlene,
13:34Julian's aunt, and the lead investigator
13:37in these investigations comes and calls on Julian
13:40to help tell the story.
13:41And I remember it so distinctly.
13:43She had texted me and said, come meet me in the barn.
13:46Bring Julian, bring your camera.
13:48And in that moment,
13:50it felt as if the world had broken open.
13:53It felt as if the film was connecting
13:57what we were experiencing.
13:59There was a portal to something else.
14:01And we talked a lot about how indigenous storytelling
14:05and tradition takes very seriously the notion
14:08of the spirit world.
14:09And that became an integral part
14:11to how we told the story of Sugarcane.
14:13Hmm.
14:15Julian, the film has had a really extraordinary impact.
14:18I think one that many documentary filmmakers dream
14:22of having an impact with your film.
14:24But in the course of the years
14:26since the film premiered at Sundance,
14:29I think it's really changed culture in many ways.
14:32Certainly raised awareness
14:34of what happened in these schools,
14:36but tangible effects that I don't think
14:39would have happened without your film,
14:40particularly last summer, then President Biden,
14:45going to Arizona, you and Emily were there for this event
14:49where he issued a formal apology,
14:51never been done before by the United States government
14:54for its role in the US run schools.
14:57Yeah, I mean, we are incredibly fortunate
14:59for this film to have come out at a time
15:02when there is a real reckoning.
15:03But I also would say that I think
15:05that we were incredibly fortunate to get to make this film
15:08as Em was sort of commenting in her last point
15:11about how we were in conversation with the narrative
15:15and artistic traditions of the people,
15:17of my people who this story is about.
15:19I think first and foremost,
15:20we were incredibly lucky to make this film
15:22in an authentic way with real journalistic
15:26and creative integrity.
15:28And that's very rare in this art form today.
15:30And we are incredibly grateful for our creative team
15:34and also to our distributor, National Geographic
15:37for seeing the value in a story that was told that way.
15:40And I think that that was, we always believed,
15:42the first step to this film having any real impact
15:46out in the world was that people respond
15:48to that kind of authenticity, to that rawness
15:51and to that real connection to a people and a place.
15:55And that film, we could have never predicted,
15:59but it's traveled and been part of a real movement
16:04over the last year.
16:07In addition to your comments about the apology,
16:11we've also screened in Canadian Parliament.
16:13Justin Trudeau described the film as extremely impactful,
16:18though Em and I kind of doubt that he actually watched it.
16:21We're not sure.
16:22We screened in the White House,
16:24which was incredibly, incredibly special.
16:27It was actually in the Indian treaty room
16:30of the White House,
16:30which is obviously symbolically significant.
16:34And we were also in many places accompanied
16:38by the first Native American Cabinet Secretary,
16:41Deb Haaland, who as the Secretary of Interior
16:45led a formal inquiry, a federal inquiry
16:48into the Native American boarding schools.
16:51It's an extraordinary film.
16:52I'm so thrilled for you on a personal level
16:55that you've been Oscar nominated,
16:57very, very richly deserved.
16:59The film is Sugar Cane
17:00from National Geographic Documentary Films.
17:03We've been joined by the directors,
17:04Julianne Brave Noisecat and Emily Cassie.
17:08Thanks so much for being with us.
17:10And again, congratulations to you both.
17:13Thanks, Matt.
17:14Cook's Champ, Matt, it's always a pleasure
17:15to talk with you.