Historic Oscar nominee ‘Sugarcane’ has local producer | Arts & Entertainment

Colorado film producer Sabrina Merage Naim is part of an unprecedented Oscar-nominated documentary that unearths horrible atrocities committed against Indigenous peoples well into the ’90s.

Not the 1890s, mind you. The 1990s.

The first few minutes of “Sugarcane” shows a group of volunteers venturing into a barn on the grounds of the St. Joseph’s Mission residential school near the Sugarcane Reservation in British Columbia – a house of horrors that was not finally closed until 1981. In that barn, a group of volunteers finds heartbreaking inscriptions from desperate children not far from where investigators have uncovered more than 50 unmarked graves.

“There were people who knew and deliberately buried information on missing and murdered Indigenous kids,” said Merage Naim, executive producer of “Sugarcane” and a graduate of St. Mary’s Academy in Englewood and the University of Denver. “They knew they were physically harassed and sexually abused – all the most horrendous things you can imagine. We need to come to terms with how that trauma is now impacting that community, even a generation or two later. It’s incumbent upon us not just to face that, but to do something about it now.”

“Sugarcane” is co-directed by Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie, which makes NoiseCat the first Indigenous American filmmaker to be nominated for an Oscar in the awards’ 97-year history. It’s a deeply personal story for NoiseCat, whose father was born at St. Joseph’s under mysterious circumstances.

The New York Times’ Alissa Wilkinson called “Sugarcane “a must-see film about a terribly difficult subject – immersive and incredibly beautiful, shot like poetry to both stunning and sobering effect.”

For more than a century, the Canadian government forcibly removed at least 150,000 ​Indigenous children from their homes. And by that, I mean officers ripped them screaming from the arms of parents who were threatened with imprisonment or worse if they did not sign their children over. The point, they said then, was to assimilate them – which really meant to neutralize what was deemed “The Indian Problem.”

The children were placed in residential schools run by the Catholic Church, which carried out a systematic strategy of cruelty and abuse to detach them from their families, languages, customs, traditions and memories. It was both a cultural and literal genocide.

And while the story of “Sugarcane” played out 1,600 miles to our north, said Merage Naim, audiences should take no comfort or exoneration from the distance and international border that separate Denver from Williams Lake in Canada. That’s because there were more than 526 government-funded Indian Boarding schools across the U.S. At least three of them were in Colorado – in Grand Junction, Ignacio and Durango. According to the 2024 Census, about 101,000 people living in Colorado today identify as being from one of 200 native tribes.

“I think it can be convenient to push off painful subjects like these as someone else’s problem,” said Merage Naim. “But this was also pervasive in the United States.”

The Catholic school Jew

Merage Naim might seem an unlikely champion for amplifying one of the most underreported atrocities in human history. She was born in L.A. and moved to Denver with her family at age 9. At St. Mary’s, “I was the Jew who went to Catholic school,” she said. She attended college in San Francisco and Tel Aviv before finishing up her degree program at DU. “That was a wonderful time because it was my first time living in Denver as a grownup, and I felt so mature,” said Merage Naim, who moved to L.A. in 2008 and started her own company, The Sabrina Merage Foundation. She is also the president of a venture capital investment firm for millennials, and in 2020 she launched Evoke Media “to tell stories that push the human race forward.”

While she has by now long lived back in L.A., she considers Denver to be the place “where I had the most formative years of my upbringing,” she said. “I still have deep roots and friendships there. My parents still live there, and I go back often. Denver holds a really meaningful place in my heart.”

“Sugarcane” came to be after Kassie, a journalist, saw a 2021 news report that the remains of 215 Indigenous children, some as young as 3, were discovered in another mass grave in British Columbia. (This became the basis of a powerful dramatic series called “Bones of Crow,” which was featured at the 2023 SeriesFest in Denver and is now available on Hulu.)

Kassie soon discovered that an investigation was underway into potentially unmarked graves near Sugarcane, 170 miles to the south. She called NoiseCat, her former colleague at the Huffington Post, and asked if they should collaborate on a documentary – not yet knowing his personal connection to the place.

 “Of 139 Indian residential schools across Canada, Emily happened to choose the one that still looms over the life of my family, my father and myself,” NoiseCat told nativenewsonline.

The reason “Sugarcane” resonates so much for NoiseCat is self-evident. The reason it hits so close to home for the Jewish girl from the Catholic School should not require much dot-connecting, either. Stories of violence and genocide in the name of faith or nationalism are hardly isolated to Indigenous populations.

“For me? I don’t have any indigenous blood in my roots,” said Merage Naim. But it resonates with me because through this film, I see what Julian went through, what his family has gone through, and what this entire community has gone through. That is the power of documentary film.”

Telling this kind of story, she said, is the very reason she started her film company. 

“That’s just the ethos of how I operate,” she said. “Unfortunately, we’re living in a time when there is so much overwhelming pain and oppression for so many people that at times it feels crippling to even consider thinking about helping anyone outside your bubble. And I think that is adding to the division, and the whole ‘us versus them’ kind of mentality we are collectively facing.

“I am one of those people who will put my time and resources and voice behind communities that I have nothing to do with because not only do I actually deeply care, but because I know it’s the right thing to do. And because I would hope that others would do it for me.”

Tonight is the night

“Sugarcane” is Merage Naim’s first film to be nominated for an Academy Award, and tonight will be her first time walking the Oscars’ red carpet. Her nomination makes her the second Colorado producer to be nominated for best documentary – Denver Academy grad Shane Boris made history in 2023, when he was nominated for two films, and won for “Navalny.”

This has been a golden age for documentaries – at least until streaming companies started restricting mass consumer access to a wide variety of films –  and “Sugarcane” is again part of a stacked field of nominees. There is much buzz for “Porcelain War” and “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat,” which were both spotlighted at the 2024 Denver Film Festival.

“Porcelain War,” which already has won 43 awards (including audience favorite at the Boulder International Film Festival”), follows three defiant Ukrainian artists (and their mine-sweeping dog, Frodo) amid the destruction of the Russian invasion. Those film subjects all took up residence in Colorado last year.

“Sugarcane” was given a week-long theatrical run at Denver Film’s Sie FilmCenter in September. But it’s produced by National Geographic, which makes it readily available to subscribers of Disney+. It is also available on Hulu.

Merage Naim is going into tonight’s awards celebration with a sense of both cautious optimism and tremendous pride, she said. “Pride in the team who poured their hearts and souls into this project. It means so much to them and Julian and his dad and his community. To see them acknowledged in this way is huge. This nomination is very validating. Whether it happens or not, honestly, I’ll be beaming.”

Beaming most of all, because her film has already made Oscars history. Well, almost most of all.

“Getting accolades like this is huge and wonderful and so meaningful,” she said. “However, the reason we all went on this journey together was to raise awareness of an issue that had been buried for decades. And if getting Oscar-nominated is the thing that really drives that home, then that’s what it is all about.

“Because we really don’t make documentaries to make money. We don’t make documentaries for fame and notoriety. We don’t make documentaries because it’s glamorous. We do it because we genuinely, deeply feel that film can make an impact. And that storytelling can open people’s eyes and change hearts and minds to really important issues that otherwise go unrecognized.”

COLORADO’S OTHER OSCAR NOMINEES

• “The Brutalist,” nominated for 10 Oscars, is written and directed by Brady Corbet, who was born in Arizona. In 1995, his single mother moved with 7-year-old Brady to Glenwood Springs. He attended Glenwood Springs elementary and middle schools and took theater classes in Carbondale. He lived in the Roaring Fork Valley until 2001, when he and his family moved to Los Angeles so he could pursue acting.

• Chris Sanders, screenwriter and director of “The Wild Robot,” was raised in Colorado Springs and graduated from Arvada High School. The DreamWorks film has three nominations, including best animated film, sound and score. “The Wild Robot,” adapted from the Peter Brown book, is about a service robot who adopts an orphaned gosling. It’s available on Peacock and AppleTV.

• “Anuja,” nominated for best live-action short film, is about a gifted 9-year-old girl who works in a New Delhi garment factory until she is offered an unexpected opportunity to attend school. It’s directed by Adam J. Graves, who teaches philosophy at Metropolitan State University of Denver, and produced by his artist wife, Suchitra Mattai, whose work has been featured at the Denver Art Museum. Mindy Kaling is a co-producer. “Anuja” is available on Netflix.

• “Porcelain War,” a nominee for best documentary feature, follows Ukrainian artists who stay to fight – and create – through the Russian occupation in Ukraine. The couple featured in the film, Slava Leontyev and Anya Stasenko, have sought temporary refuge in Colorado for the past year. Producer Paula DuPré Pesmen was born in Boulder.