The film, directed by Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie, is about an investigation into abused and missing children at an Indian residential school near Williams Lake in British Columbia, which ignites a reckoning on the nearby Sugarcane Reserve.
“This is a foundational story of how North America was colonized, and what happened to Native people," NoiseCat said. "It's not just our story, it's all of your story. And we believe that our film can help share that story with the broader world to understand that this is something that we need to know and we need to make, right.”
The two directors met ten years ago when they sat next to each other at their first reporting jobs. When Kassie came across the story, she asked NoiseCat, who is of Native American descent, if he wanted to work on it together.
“I told Em I had to think about it. You know, there's a very painful story in my family about the residential schools. And so I needed to take some time to think through whether this would be something I felt comfortable taking on," NoiseCat said.
When Kassie told him the residential school she was looking into was the one that NoiseCat’s family had attended, they decided to team up and work on the film together.
Kassie said they spent a lot of time out in the field gathering stories, and it was difficult to leave some of them out of the film.
“Letting go of pieces and characters was for us one of the most challenging parts because this is a world that has hundreds and hundreds of stories to tell beautiful stories, cinematic stories, it's a world worthy of epic storytelling," Kassie said.
NoiseCat thanked all their participants for trusting them with some of their darkest most painful stories. As a participant himself, he said he knows it wasn’t easy but having such a caring and compassionate team made the film possible.
In the press line, NoiseCat celebrated their win with a war call.
