Special thanks to  AIO (American for Indian Opportunity) , INDIGENOUS CINEMA SCREENINGS & NATIVEZINE Productions!  

“Enlightening and infuriating” (Variety), 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.

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.

SUGARCANE has been celebrated by critics, calling it “the product of humane and insightful filmmakers who are determined to never let anyone forget” (Variety) and “as much a piece of art about the sins of the past as it is about living with the memory of those sins in the present” (IndieWire).

"Something more meaningful than a mere history lesson. It's a portrait of what remains when injustice occurs." - Esther Zuckerman, IndieWire

"Co-directors Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie deliver a quietly devastating account of unpunished crimes committed by representatives of the Catholic Church." - Joe Leydon, Variety

"A gut-punch of a documentary... Sugarcane handles its heavy subject matter without despair. NoiseCat and Kassie find hope in the fact that their story has no obvious conclusion. They weave in surprising moments of levity, uplift their subjects and embrace the turbulent emotional arc of the investigation into St. Joseph’s. In the end, Sugarcane affirms that if we are to ever rectify the past and present-day violences of colonialism, we have no choice but to act." - Lovia Gyarkye, The Hollywood Reporter