National Geographic Documentary Films' Sugarcane is nominated for an Academy Award in the Best Documentary Feature category. The film takes a look at abuse and missing children at a Christian boarding school in Canada, and the affects it had on the nearby Sugarcane Indian reserve, from which the children came.
Sugarcane was directed by Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie. The project dates back to 2021, following the discovery of hundreds of potential unmarked graves of students in the apple orchard of the Kamloops Indian Residential School. Kassie reached out to NoiseCat to collaborate on the documentary, both not knowing that it would ultimately involve his own family's history.
Christopher LaMarca served as director of photography, with Kassie also handling cinematography duties. The project was shot using Canon C500 m2 and C300 m2 cameras, and edited by Nathan Punwar and Maya Daisy Hawke. Mali Obomsawin composed the original music.
According to Kassie, the feature was edited in Adobe Premiere. The color grade was then applied by Nice Shoes' Marcy Robinson using Blackmagic Design's daVinci Resolve.
"I’ll never forget when editors Maya Daisy Hawke and Nathan Punwar sent us a draft of the opening sequence," recalls Kassie. "We really believed and had communicated that these were people and characters worthy of epic cinematic storytelling, and so they said, 'Why not give them a title sequence?'"
According to NoiseCat, one of the documentary's biggest challenges was not getting lost in the volume of footage and infinite permutations of how that footage could be assembled to tell the story.
"[Emily] and I really developed a shared vision and understanding of what the film was and needed to be very early on," he explains. "When we were in the field, and then through the edit, we refined that, and I think that that North Star was essential to our ability to put the film together. Of course we discovered things along the way. There were certain ideas or things that we wanted to try - so many of them that didn't necessarily work out. And the experience of making a film like this - a verité film especially - is one of failing 99 percent of the time, and then that one percent of the time that you get it right, is the film. That's the end product. I think that we could have never done it if we hadn't developed that really shared vision and understanding of what the film would be."