Sugarcane (2024)

Rated R for being quite appropriately graphic about the abuses of the Catholic Church.  These abuses range from physical abuse, to sexual abuse, to straight up mass murder.  While we never see any of the abuse, the descriptions of these actions are harrowing.  The results of these actions lead to alcoholism and we meet some of these alcoholics throughout the film.  It's a brutal movie.  R.

DIRECTORS:  Emily Kassie and Julian Brave NoiseCat

​Again, very hard to write about documentaries.  How do we write about subject matter while divorcing it from the context in which it is presented?  Part of the argument that goes into determining Best Documentary Feature is how much it moves you.  As part of that, there's the idea that one's personal politics plays a part in the investment that comes with a documentary.   Perhaps if you asked me years ago about a movie like Sugarcane, I would have been skeptical.  I'm far introspective nowadays.  I didn't go into this with a defensive stance.  Instead, I let the misery wash over me.  It sounds like a sadistic attitude to take, but the only way that real change will ever happen is if people start looking at themselves before putting up walls.

For those not in the know about Sugarcane, this is a documentary looking at the Catholic Church's abuse of indigenous people in Canadian missionary schools.  While it draws attention to its American sister schools, Sugarcane points the camera at one particular school as a representative of an institution that preyed on indigenous people for decades.  When I was in high school, all of the attention towards the Catholic Church focused on sexual abuses by the clergy.  I was also at the height of my charismatic love for the Church during this time, so a large part of me wanted to bury my head in the sand.  After all, I was hearing things from adults that it was overblown.  I think I heard a report from a pretty biased source that said that the amount of sexual abuse among the clergy was typical if not less than other professions.  Do you know how I held onto that fact as a life raft for a lot of my formative years?  It made the world make sense.

But as time passes and more information gets out there about pastoral abuse, especially when it comes to minors, there has to be a willful ignorance to ignore it.  We're re-entering some pretty dark times.  The last two weeks in America have been incredibly troubling.  There is a culture war going on between a bunch of different factions.  The mental culture war I'm fighting is between Christian Nationalists (who seem to be gaining more and more traction within the Church) and progressive Catholics (a term that I would have been mortified to be associated with at one point but now find to be a beautiful concept.)  (I'd also like to note that I wrote  a lot of this blog, but then lost it pretty quickly when Windows opened a new website...somehow.  I'm pretty angry that I have to rewrite this.  Also, I was supposed to go on a date with my wife tonight to celebrate our anniversary, but my oldest daughter didn't do her homework again.  These sentences are my way of venting my frustration.)   Anyway, back to the notion of accepting truths.  When I was far more conservative, there was this need to defend the Church against accusations.  If I repeat something, I apologize, but I'm trying to recreate my initial argument.  Back then, someone told me some pretty dubious information.  I remember desperately grasping on to this pretty unverified fact that said that while sexual abuse in the Catholic Church existed, it was on par or less than other professions.  Do you know how much I held onto that like it was gold?  That gave me hope for the world.

But stuff like Sugarcane keeps coming out.  It is incredibly hard to be a Catholic in light of stuff like that.  I can't imagine what it is like to be Rick Gilbert in this movie.  Rick Gilbert has the unfortunate role as the most paradoxical indigenous person in this movie.  While it seems that anyone else tied to these missionary schools distanced themselves from the Church (probably rightly), Rick Gilbert married Annie and seems to have become a pastor.  How do you go from a world that praised the name of Christ and then did these horrible things to devoting one's life to Christ?  I mean, I'm having a hard time holding onto my faith and that's just me interacting with people who lack empathy.  But Sugarcane is a spotlight on some truly awful communities who institutionalized abuse on a scale that I have a hard time even comprehending.  Like, there was a point in time when I was thinking about becoming a priest.  Right now, I'm sitting here thinking that I dodged a bullet because I struggle real hard in my early 40s.  But at the height of my faith, with the zeal I was holding in my heart, imagine if I went into the seminary to discover that there were all these monsters who did awful things.

Like, the events described in Sugarcane are on par with almost concentration camp level evil.  Children were raped.  Babies were thrown into an incinerator.  Live babies, thrown into fire.  I don't know how to stress how evil this movie got without straight up telling you what happened.  I know I'm stating some real obvious stuff here, but how could people who espouse the teachings of Christ?  What is it about people that proclaim the Good News the loudest also seem to have the darkest sins attached to them?  There has to be some kind of psychological correlation.  It's really messed up.  I'm not saying that holy people are without sin.  But the darkness that came out of these missionary schools is so bleak that it makes me question everything.  I know that there are good people who have religious convictions.  I refuse to believe that every single religious person has this darkness inside of them.  Like, it shouldn't be to a point where I hear that someone is filled with the spirit and that raises a yellow flag for me.  I don't know what to think anymore.

There's also this secondary narrative in the story that I feel like the directors want me to pick up on and it is the weightlessness of an apology.  There are a few threads in the documentary, just because the different individuals have different ways of looking at events.  Not that they don't all view it as less than horrible.  It's just that they are different people and they process trauma differently.  Going back to the Gilberts, he goes to the Vatican to receive an apology from Pope Francis.  I tend to love Pope Francis.  But I can't say that I haven't heard some stuff that might make Francis complicit in stuff.  I don't know what to believe.  We live in an era where there is a glut of information and all of it seems contradictory.  Anyway, Gilbert goes to the Vatican to receive his apology and it seemed so tone deaf.  Again, I love Francis, but there seemed to be an exhaustion to the apology.  It's almost that a ceremonial figurehead is so used to apologizing for the atrocities of an entire faith community that the words seem to lose any kind of merit.  I want these apologies to be heartfelt.  I want to be able to go into a time in my Church where actual change seems to happen.  It's not that Francis did anything wrong with the apology.  It's just that he didn't do the right thing with it either.

And these horrors that came out of the school?  They cause all of these ripples in people's lives.  These events don't live in a void.  Everyone in the community seems to be carrying their pain differently.  The prevalence of alcoholism seems to be a common theme.  But then there's the story of the director and his father.  Julian and Ed NoiseCat have an estranged relationship that may be one of the more sympathetic abandonment stories that I ever heard.  A less sympathetic watcher might say that emotional vulnerability made Ed NoiseCat a bad father.  But this is a man who carries around so much mental scarring from the things that happened to him in the missionary school that he had no idea what it meant to be an adult, let alone a parent.  It's heartbreaking to watch.

I would sooner watch a documentary about this than an adaptation about this.  Spotlight covered similar material and everyone lost their minds.  I'm sooner moved by the real stories by the actual people.  What Sugarcane accomplishes is the fact that we are experiencing these events from the perspective of the fallout without actually dumbing down the events that happened there.  The problem I have with movies like Spotlight is that it makes it all about the intellectual investigation and we have to imagine what the trauma was like.  Sugarcane hits hard.   A good documentary makes you look at everything a little bit differently.  That's what Sugarcane did.