Accountability In Sugarcane (2024)

In the last few months, the Anti-Racist Film Club has been covering films on the lighter side of our tonal programming. This was not the case in January. 

Sugarcane (2024) is a documentary directed by Julian Brave Noisecat and Emily Kassie—two investigative journalists who follow one First Nations investigation into an Indigenous Boarding School in British Columbia. Through interviews with the remaining survivors of St Joseph’s Mission School, this documentary is an intimate reminder that atrocities committed in and outside our history books have consequences for real people. Effects of trauma and cultural genocide persist long after the school's closure and will continue to be painfully unwound from the reservation's collective story for years to come.

In our club discussion, we lingered on the concept of “truth” and how this film tells a more complete truth than we’d formally been taught before. The film’s cinematographer, Christopher LaMarca, describes the filming process of Sugarcane as an exercise in cinema vérité or the “cinema of truth.” This is a French-style of documentary editing that focuses on minimizing the filmmaker’s role in the content they capture. Rather than formal interviews or narration, cinema vérité attempts to give us an unbiased account of the subject’s story as if we, the audience, are merely a “fly on the wall” in the room. 

Whether or not an unbiased narrative is an achievable goal, one club member pointed out that a few of the most painful conversations were recorded with audio only—as if the documentary’s participants were only comfortable sharing their stories when the camera itself had left the room. These are members of a community who were abused into life-long silence. One might ask how a story so horrific could be kept secret for generations… but the truth is that the children who did advocate for themselves were either murdered or scared into submission by the institutions who had committed the atrocities.

Of course, the process of finally sharing these stories is, in of itself, traumatizing. 

Another question that centered our conversation was: what is the worth of an apology? If the priests themselves who’d committed the crimes at St Joseph’s had already died, who should be held accountable for the harm their past actions still cause today? In the film, Pope Francis delivers an apology speech to gathered representatives from victimized Indigenous communities… but simple acknowledgement of the horrors committed in the name of the Catholic Church is not enough to rectify centuries of cruelty. If we cannot hold the murderers responsible for their crimes, what path do we have to justice? 

I won’t pretend that our small group finished discussion of practical reparations in an hour, but we did agree that apologies open the door for actionable change. To apologize is another way to tell the truth. When we are unable to face the monstrosity our institutions are built on, there is no way to reform them from the inside out. Organizations in power have more inherent control over the historical narrative. And we have an obligation to tell the truth… even admissions of guilt. To endorse further silence would only perpetuate the generational trauma Indigenous communities have carried for hundreds of years. 

The work of anti-racism does not stop at performative apologies. But only by acknowledging harm can we begin to do the painful work of healing.