Road to the Oscars 2025: This is nominated in 1 category, best documentary.
Sugarcane is a tough watch. It is highly unconfutable and it´s subject matter will get under your skin, questioning a lot about humanity and it´s view on other people in society. There is a lot of racism still in our world and that leads to terrible acts from humans. This is a story about that, living with your pain. Moving on or confront the past. Sadly the doc is a bit all over the place not really having a real focus. It should have anchored itself in one of the stories or at least made the players in the doc more visible, treated them with the full documentary each one of their stories deserve.
An investigation into a former residential catholic native school leads to a confrontation from the Sugarcane native reserve that recalls the abuse of many natures and murders that took place at the school.
This doc is following a lot of people, a bit too many in my opinion, its fluid nature makes it hard to follow where we are and the many people in it blends together into a hard to really follow mess. It should have anchored itself in some of them or at least tell their story in a more respectful way where we follow their story "to the end" and then set focus on something else. We have a guy trying to understand his past, a pastor seeking redemption in the church, the investigation on the whole matter, it´s a lot and a lot of micro stories in a larger story to follow at the same time.
It is a doc without much conclusion but is there even one? Can all the abuse and crimes against natives ever be forgiven fully? This is a doc about that, learning to live with what has happened, by either confronting the people that did it or fully accepting the crimes happened and learn to live with it. We are also presented with more native culture and it´s interesting to see. It is a lot to take in and the emotions here are very high. There are so much sadness, anger, confusion, unaccepting that makes the doc hard to watch at times, its harrowing to think what happened to these people just because they were seen as lesser humans by some.
There is a lot of beautiful footage in this movie but it can at times also seem a bit setup. "Sit here, look this way, walk over here" there is a lot of that here, a lot of shots and footage that looks fabricated. And while all docs includes some levels of this, it should be invisible to the audience as to not lose too much authenticity.
Overall I think Sugarcane is worth watching for the soul reason that these people deserve their story told and listened to. But from a pure doc perspective I don´t know if I liked the pacing and all the cooks in the kitchen here.
Oscar predictions:
This is the only doc I have watched and I must say, after looking up some of the other contenders, I don´t know if this has a chance. Docs about Gaza and Ukraine still rings a lot in our world and I think docs like them has more of a chance to win.
