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Sugarcane Movie Review

Sugarcane is a 2024 documentary film directed by Julian Brave Noisecat and Emily Kassie. It’s a tragic doc about a very difficult subject matter.

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“I wanna know the whole story“

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An investigation into abuse and missing children at an Indian residential school sparks a reckoning on the nearby Sugarcane Reserve. This film is not an easy watch because it deals with horrible injustices and a painful history of Canada that has only recently begun to be explored and talked about. The tone of this movie is one of pain and sorrow, but also reckoning and urgency.

There is a significant emphasis here on the sins of the Catholic Church, especially as it regards sexual abuse. Now, we have seen numerous movies deal with this issue before, and sure enough this movie felt rather familiar in that area. It’s nothing that we’ve not seen before and it did not seem shocking to me at all.

With that being said, the movie still elicited an emotional response from me, particularly in that powerful scene where a man confronts his tragic past in the church openly. That scene was so moving because it felt so personal and genuine. The choice to actually highlight real stories through honest interviews was a sound one as it led to a more authentic viewing experience.

Sugarcane doesn’t quite develop the other story properly – the father-son relationship. I also would have liked to have learned about its subjects much more. The footage from the past is quite sparse, so the movie felt limited in that area. I would have personally gone the recreation route as the movie desperately needed more scenes set in the past than in the present.

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Still, this doc is very well edited, directed and structured. It’s a long film for the medium, but I didn’t feel that length because it was engaging in its story, illuminating in its interviews and quite authentic in its emotions. That Trudeau moment was unnecessary and just very annoying, but besides that small scene, the rest of the movie was very effective.