Three new streaming documentaries: Sugarcane is on Disney+, The Bibi Files is on DocPlay and Faye is on Neon
Editor’s note
In case you missed it earlier in the week, confirming that this will be the last newsletter for 2024. I’m taking a break for a couple of weeks (and throwing myself into six weeks of At the Summer Movies for RNZ) and the first edition of 2025 should land at 3.15 NZDT on the afternoon of 6 January.
We sat in stunned silence for a few minutes after the final credits rolled past at the end of Sugarcane. What can you say?
The film is named after the Sugarcane Reserve, the unofficial name for the Williams Lake Indian Reserve in British Columbia, Canada, location of the St. Joseph’s Residential School, one of hundreds of schools set up in the late 19th and early 20th century to teach the children of Native people how to be proper Canadians. Or Americans, there were plenty of these institutions in the US, too.
The film follows tribal investigators, the young Williams Lake Chief Willie Sellars, former Chief Rick Gilbert, filmmaker Julian Brave NoiseCat and his father Ed, as they try and find out the truth about the systematic abuse (and worse) of children supposedly cared for by the Catholic Church at St. Joseph’s.
I say “and worse” because our usual definitions of abuse barely covers what went on there. Apart from the freezing or drowning deaths of runaways, the suicides of former residents in appalling numbers, the denial of indigenous culture and belief, the contemptible dehumanisation of the whole thing – that’s just the beginning.
Children were removed from their homes and families at the age of five and taken to these schools where many would be physically and sexually abused, Often girls would be made pregnant by Brothers, their children adopted back into Native families so that they could be taken away to repeat the cycle. They were, you might say, the lucky ones. Countless newborn babies were simply placed in the school incinerator, never to be spoken of.
Astonishingly, many of these victims have kept their Catholic faith. Gilbert joins a group that travels to Rome for an audience with Pope Francis, an abused person’s hope that they may yet bask in the love of their abuser. He has a meeting with the current head of the order that ran St. Joseph’s who, while clearly moved and troubled by what had been done in his name, tries to tell us that ‘we had a bad 100 years or so there, but we are trying to do better’.
The conclusion I came to is that the Catholic Church has given up any right to a social license and should simply be dissolved and all its riches shared among its adherents – the poorest first.
Equally heartbreaking is that the burden of healing the multiple generations affected falls on their own community. “We don’t normally do this,” says the Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer as he opens up file after file of unsolved – often uninvestigated – heinous crimes so that the tribal investigators can start putting the pieces together, decades later.
There were hundreds of victims at St. Joseph’s and St. Joseph’s was one of hundreds of schools that operated in the same way. It simply defies comprehension.
Another troubling realisation in a week of them was seeing the case made that the deaths of tens of thousands of people in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, and now Syria, can be traced back to one man’s taste for expensive cigars (and his wife’s preference for the finest champagne).
The content below was originally paywalled.
In The Bibi Files, leaked Israeli police interrogation videos show how close Benjamin Netanyahu came to being prosecuted for the most prosaic of corruption charges before he saved his political career by forming a coalition with the worst of Israel’s right wing political movements and getting into an endless war of expansion that is now being fought on three fronts.
Actually, the cigars and the champagne were only the beginning of the story, even if they alone would have meant years in prison if the case had been concluded in time. As Israel’s longest serving prime minister, Netanyahu had an inflated idea of his own superstardom as well as a persecution complex about the media and opposition. Some of the footage revealed in The Bibi Files is jaw dropping in its hubris.
The defining characteristic of right wing politics in this shady world in which we find ourselves is shamelessness. Trump has taught these people to never admit defeat, never show weakness. And we have no effective tactics to counter them.
Finally, a showbiz biography that does not much that’s new with the form but is about a fascinating and complex individual. Faye is about the actor Faye Dunaway, at one time biggest female star in Hollywood, but whose troublesome reputation meant that opportunities dried up as she got older.
As the film makes clear – and Ms. Dunaway is candid about – she wasn’t simply ‘difficult or ‘demanding’, she was bipolar and even if she wanted things to be different, there was only so much control she had.
The work is exceptional, though, and I was reminded that – no matter how we feel about whether Roman Polanski should be “cancelled” or not – the best introduction that I can think of to the world of film studies is Chinatown. You can come at that film from so many different angles and they would all be rewarding, illuminating, informative, and help you see every film you watch afterwards in a different light.
