Secwépemc filmmaker Julian Brave NoiseCat and Toronto journalist Emily Kassie have received an Oscar nomination for best documentary feature for their film “Sugarcane.”
The doc is a quietly haunting account of deaths, rapes, suicides and missing children at the former St. Joseph’s Mission Residential School, a Catholic-run facility near Sugar Cane reserve in Williams Lake, B.C.
NoiseCat appears in the film with his father Ed Archie NoiseCat, who was born at St. Joseph’s Mission. The film explores long-standing allegations that priests who fathered children with school residents sent the infants to an incinerator.
Kassie is an Emmy and Peabody-nominated investigative journalist who connected with NoiseCat to work on the film when she began looking into St. Joseph’s Mission.
“Sugarcane” won the directing prize at last year’s Sundance Film Festival.
The 97th Academy Awards will take place March 2 in Los Angeles.
NoiseCat told The Canadian Press last year that he realized the film would be incomplete if he and his family weren’t a part of it.
“My family had stories that cut to the core of the infanticide that happened at St. Joseph’s Mission,” he said.
“I felt that if I wasn’t willing to go there with my own story and my own family’s story, then would I really be giving this documentary my all?”
