Behind the Lens: Filmmakers Emily Kassie and Julian Brave NoiseCat on Sugarcane
Article In The Thread
Feb. 18, 2025
On the heels of their Oscar nomination for Sugarcane, we’re excited to speak with filmmakers and New America Fellows Emily Kassie and Julian Brave NoiseCat. Their powerful feature documentary offers a stunning tribute to the resilience of Native people and their way of life, set against the backdrop of a pivotal moment in history. In 2021, the discovery of unmarked graves at an Indian residential school in Canada shed light on the forced separation, assimilation, and abuse suffered by Indigenous children in these institutions. This revelation ignited a national reckoning, prompting conversations about the system designed to destroy Indigenous communities.
Sugarcane takes us deep into a community that is breaking cycles of intergenerational trauma and finding the strength to persevere. In this conversation, you’ll hear from Emily and Julian about the making of the film, the challenges they faced, and what this Oscar nomination means for them and the critical issues they’ve brought to light.
Congratulations on earning an Oscar nomination! What does this recognition mean to you personally, and how does it feel to have Sugarcane acknowledged by the Academy?
Emily Kassie: To have our film recognized by the Academy is surreal! But more than anything, it is a testament to the courage of the survivors featured in Sugarcane who mustered the strength to confront this horrific history in such a vulnerable way. We feel so grateful that this largely ignored and untold origin story of North America will be known and that our film is catalyzing that change. It’s also particularly historic because Julian [the film’s co-director] is the first Indigenous North American filmmaker to be nominated for an Academy Award in its over 90-year history. That is a particularly rigid ceiling to break through as Hollywood has often positioned Native people at the end of a barrel of a gun. I’m so proud of what we made and proud to stand beside him.
Julian Brave NoiseCat: For over thirty years, my aunt Charlene Belleau, the matriarch at the heart of our film, has been working and praying to ensure the power of this truth was known to the world. It’s an honor to be part of her legacy and to help the world recognize the power of this story and the deep collaboration between Emily and me, and our team that brought Sugarcane to fruition. It’s been the ride of our lives. While it’s an honor to be the “first,” this recognition is a testament to the power of the Indigenous storytelling and cinematic traditions of which I am a student. And I hope I’m not the only one for long.
You were both New America Fellows. Emily, your fellowship project was focused on making Sugarcane. What inspired you to make this film together? How did you first connect?
Kassie: I spent a decade as a documentary filmmaker and investigative journalist focusing on human rights abuses and conflicts around the world from Afghanistan to Niger, but I never turned my lens on my own country and the horrors it perpetrated against its first peoples. I’m born and raised in Canada and the last [First Nations] boarding school closed in 1997, my first year of kindergarten. So in the spring of 2021, when news broke about a discovery of potential unmarked graves on the grounds of a former residential school, I felt gut-pulled to the story. The next thing I did was reach out to my old friend and colleague Julian. Julian and I were cub reporters, randomly assigned the desks next to each other a decade ago. In the years since, Julian had become one of the foremost writers, journalists, and historians on Indigenous life in North America. [Working with him] felt like a really wonderful fit for this project.
While Julian gave the project some thought, I started my search and found an article about Chief Willie Sellars of the Williams Lake First Nation, as they were beginning their own investigation into the Indian residential schools. I sent Chief Sellars a cold email and he called me back that day. “The Creator has always had good timing for me,” he said. “Just yesterday, our Council said we need someone to document our search.” Two weeks later, Julian called again. I told him I was planning on following the search at St. Joseph’s Mission near Williams Lake. He paused. “That’s the school where my family was sent and where I heard my father was born nearby.” Out of 139 schools, I chose the one school where Julian’s family attended and where we would later find out his father’s life began.
NoiseCat: This is a deeply spiritual story. The Indian residential schools were first and foremost institutions for spiritual colonization where one way of being was nearly killed off and replaced with another. The search for truth in the wake of that cultural genocide inherently brings to the fore our relationship to ancestors who came before and who have, in many instances, gone on. In the case of my father, it probes what it means to have been born into such a system at the precipice of death—to have survived. And what it is to be descended from that story, to carry it in your name. In Secwépemc tradition, we acknowledge the presence and agency of ancestors and spiritual forces. The way this film came together—its subject matter and the events we witnessed—required us to take that tradition seriously.
While you have covered stories across the globe, this project brings you both back to your home country of Canada—and in a setting with some deeply personal connections. How was your experience as a storyteller different because of this?
NoiseCat: As a nonfiction storyteller, my craft is about how I choose to observe and live life. This story brought me home and brought me back to my people. As an Indigenous practitioner of nonfiction, it called me to live my life and to make my art in a way that is true to my ancestors. That will shape my work and life for the rest of my days.
Kassie: We were brought up with a national identity that was sort of a utopian version of America: a successful project in multiculturalism, a gentler, kinder version of our southern neighbors. So making this film, as you can imagine, shattered those illusions and forced me to grapple with the willful ignorance of the society I was brought up in. At the same time, I was able to experience the epic landscapes of British Columbia and the beauty of this community, which simultaneously elicited a deep love of the place I was born. I think my ability to understand the experiences and perspectives of non-Indigenous Canadians, and Julian’s inside view of Indigenous communities, allowed us to create a cinematic world that is both accessible and moving to everyone.
An Oscar nomination is a monumental achievement for the Sugarcane production team and for the people and communities whose stories are shared in the film. Collaboration clearly played a crucial role in bringing this story to life. Could you speak to any key partnerships, whether with local organizations, experts, or communities, that were particularly instrumental in the film’s creation? Furthermore, how did the New America fellowship support the development of this project and help shape its journey to the screen?
Kassie: The collaboration between me and Julian, the rest of our creative film team, the Williams Lake First Nation, and our participants created this really beautiful community around the film. Of course, that quickly grew to a village as more people and supporters joined us to lift up this story. That includes over 30 executive producers, with grants from the Sundance Institute, Catapult, and so many more. New America not only provided financial support, which was crucial in staying afloat while we cobbled together funding for the film, but also provided a community of brilliant thinkers and storytellers to connect and brainstorm with. So many of my cohort came to Sugarcane screenings, which meant so much to me.
NoiseCat: Em and I come from mostly individual and solitary journalistic practices. This collaboration was deep and revolutionary for our artistic practices and for the film we made. Grants and fellowships like New America created the community and provided the funding that enabled this project and collaboration.
What do you hope the film will teach viewers? How do you see it fitting into the legacy of Indian residential schools and reconciliation?
NoiseCat: Nothing short of correcting the record of a foundational chapter in North American history while demonstrating the power of Indigenous stories and storytellers and our people.
Kassie: Our hope is for Sugarcane to be a part of school curriculum across North America, and, as Julian said, to do nothing short of correcting the record and re-write history. We’ve brought the film to the highest reaches of government, from Canadian parliament to the White House and around the world. We’ve also brought the film to Indigenous communities on what we call our “rez tour” from Sitka, Alaska, to YellowKnife in the Northwest Territories, to Standing Rock in the Dakotas. To see multiple generations of families, survivors with their grandkids and kids, watch the film together and begin to talk to each other has been remarkable.
Given the depth of the story in Sugarcane, do you see the potential for expanding this narrative into any future projects? And, what exciting new ventures or projects are on the horizon for you both?
Kassie: Julian has a book coming out; he’s much more prolific. As for me, I’ll be setting off somewhere (hopefully in the spring) with my camera to live a new story.
NoiseCat: My first book, We Survived the Night, will be published by Knopf in October. It interweaves a father-son narrative with reportage and the mythic legend of my peoples’ supernatural forefather, the trickster Coyote, into a story about what it means to be Indigenous to this land. I love to do what I do and I hope I get to keep doing it for as long as I can trick the powers that be into letting me create. And who knows, maybe someday those stories will bring Em and I back together.
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