Kassie and NoiseCat marry rigour with compassion, giving the survivors the platform to talk while understanding that some things are too hard to put into words.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Dec 23, 2024

The damaged, rising community depicted in Sugarland are in no mood for apologies. They want accountability.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 28, 2024

It’s a remarkably courageous and exposed work, particularly for co-director Julian Brave NoiseCat and his father, Ed Archie NoiseCat, whose painful journey together in search of healing is the film’s spine.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 23, 2024

Deeply disquieting and indeed enraging.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 18, 2024

This multipronged filmmaking approach, chronicling the painstaking work of a cold case while documenting what years of whispers and silence have wrought, is what gives “Sugarcane” its raw power.

| Aug 19, 2024

The filmmakers resist every opportunity to amp up or falsify a single development. The truth is scalding enough.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Aug 19, 2024

Directed by Emily Kassie and Julian Brave NoiseCat, the film is an indictment of a cultural tragedy; a testament to the steadfastness, against all odds, of the Indigenous community; and a plea for healing.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Aug 15, 2024

NoiseCat, who is of Secwepemc and St’at’imc descent, has co-directed a powerful documentary, “Sugarcane,” which not only follows the investigation but portrays the resilience of the people and culture of British Columbia’s Williams Lake First Nation.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 15, 2024

Sugarcane is as harrowing as it is vital. It’s a remarkably explicit consideration of intergenerational trauma that manages to center specific suffering without forgoing any aspects of the conditions that birthed such violence.

| Aug 13, 2024

It’s profoundly evocative, with spoken memories and moments of inability to muster the words gut-punching with equal measure.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Aug 12, 2024

Co-directors Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie approach this painful conversation with the sensitivity and empathy it’s rarely afforded, and their film shows how it is almost impossible to adequately speak to this trauma.

| Aug 7, 2024

This is documentary filmmaking at its best. A credit to the genre. Compelling, spiritual and enlightening.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Feb 8, 2024

This powerful documentary operates from a place of pure and total empathy.

| Jan 31, 2024

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

| Jan 31, 2024

The evidence it presents of predator priests, child abuse and infanticide by incinerator at B.C.’s notorious St. Joseph’s Mission residential school sears the mind and haunts the soul.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jan 29, 2024

[An] accomplished, devastating documentary...

| Jan 25, 2024

Sensitively approaches a painful history.

| Jan 21, 2024

‘Sugarcane’ is something more meaningful than a mere history lesson. It’s a portrait of what remains when injustice occurs.

| Original Score: A- | Jan 21, 2024