Sandra Hale Schulman
ICT
It was a long bittersweet road for “Sugarcane,” the film nominated for Best Documentary Feature at the 2025 Oscars.
While the acclaimed film did not win the Oscar Sunday night, March 2, at the Academy Awards, director Julian Brave NoiseCat won as the first North American Indigenous filmmaker to be nominated in the category.
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“No matter what happens at the Oscars this weekend, I am incredibly proud of our film, our team, our participants, our families, our communities, our people and especially our survivors,” NoiseCat said in a social media post.
“Helping tell this story has been a profound and life-changing experience. Kukwstsétselp (thank you) to everyone who has watched and supported,” he said.
The heart-wrenching film investigates the Catholic-run state schools enforced upon Indigenous children in Canada, particularly the one in Kamloops, Canada, where his father, Ed Archie NoiseCat was almost incinerated as a newborn, apparently the only baby to escape that fate.
Despite the heavy subject matter, the film team was exuberant on the red carpet. Julian Brave NoiseCat wore beaded earrings, a black shirt with a floral embroidered suede vest, a gorget neckpiece featuring a deer head and turquoise. Ed Archie NoiseCat wore a classic tuxedo with a black-brimmed hat and mirrored sunglasses.
“So incredibly grateful to my nations, my friends and especially my family — by blood and in film — for this Academy Award nomination (What a crazy thing to even get to write!),” the younger NoiseCat said in the Instagram post. “The stories of the First Peoples of this land deserve to be known and recognized. To all who came before and have been working and praying for this for so long, thank you. It is an honor to learn from you and follow in your footsteps, as that is our way. Xwexweyt te kwseltkten, all my relations.”
He continued, “The news of the grim discovery in Kamloops hit close to home for me. All my adult life, I’d heard rumors that my father was born at or near one of those residential schools and that he’d been found, just minutes after his birth, abandoned in a dumpster,” he said. “Those few details were all he or I knew. The silence, shame and guilt that hid this history from broader society rippled across generations of Indigenous families like my own. Our communities continue to suffer from cycles of suicide, addiction and violence, instigated by the experience at these schools.”
In an opinion piece for The New York Times Julian Brave NoiseCat wrote, “It’s an honor to be the first Indigenous filmmaker from North America to be nominated for an Academy Award. But I better not be the only one for long. Some might see this nomination as historic and proof that Hollywood has come a long way from the time when studios portrayed Indians dying at the hands of swaggering cowboys. That era of western movies coincided with the heyday of the residential schools, which were designed to kill off Indigenous cultures and which led, in some cases, to the death of children themselves.”
The film earned many prestigious accolades — including a 90/100 on Metacritic and a 100 percent positivity score on Rotten Tomatoes, signifying universal acclaim. It has also been praised by renowned voices like former President Barack Obama who listed it as a top film from last year. Even former President Joe Biden acknowledged its impact.
“Sugarcane shines light on this shameful chapter of history, helping ensure that it is never forgotten or repeated,” Biden said.
The film premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the U.S. Documentary for Directing award. There was an emotional screening in Santa Fe last summer attended by Julian and his father, with a Q&A hosted by “Dark Winds” director Chris Eyre that left the mostly Native audience weeping.
The documentary had the rare honor of a White House screening, with then-Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, director NoiseCat and other dignitaries in attendance in December.
On Oct. 25, Biden traveled to the Gila River Indian Reservation in Arizona offering a historic apology for the federal government’s role in the boarding schools that abused Indigenous children. After the screening, the filmmaking team received a letter from Biden in which he reiterated his condemnation.
“I have always believed that we must know the good, the bad, and the truth of our past so that we can begin to remember and heal,” he wrote. “That is why I became the first President to issue a formal apology for the Federal Indian Boarding School era — one of our Nation’s most horrific periods.
“For over 150 years, the Federal Government ran boarding schools that forcibly removed generations of Native children from their homes to live at schools that were often far away,” the letter stated. “The schools aimed to assimilate Native children by stripping them of their languages, religions, and cultures, often separating them from their families for years, with some never returning home. Native children endured physical, emotional, and sexual abuse, and at least 973 children died in these schools.”
The president continued, “The ‘Sugarcane’ documentary shines a light on this shameful chapter of history, helping ensure that it is never forgotten or repeated… I know the story of ‘Sugarcane’ wasn’t easy to tell, but we do ourselves no favors by pretending it didn’t happen.”
“Sugarcane” is now streaming on Hulu.
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