Looking at the past to understand the present, making art as a form of resistance, addressing trauma through storytelling — these were just some of the topics that the filmmakers behind four of the five Oscar-nominated feature documentaries discussed during a panel hosted by TheWrap’s Executive Awards Editor Steve Pond that was part of our ongoing Screening Series. Joining Pond were “Sugarcane” directors Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie; “Black Box Diaries” director Shiori Itō; “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat” director Johan Grimonprez; and “Porcelain War” producer Paula DuPré Pesman. (The filmmakers for the fifth nominated documentary, “No Other Land,” were not available to participate.)
“Sugarcane” and “Black Box Diaries” are the most personal of the four films, though that was not necessarily the “Sugarcane” directors’ original intention. The documentary investigates the systemic abuse and murder of indigenous children in residential schools in Canada and the U.S. that, overseen by the governments and the Catholic Church, were implemented at the end of the 19th century and not fully discontinued until 1998. Kassie had already established contact with the Williams Lake First Nation in British Columbia when she reached out to Brave NoiseCat, whom she’d known when they were both cub reporters in Canada.
“He told me he’d be open to working on a project with me. And I told him that I was going to follow a search at St. Joseph’s Mission,” she said. “He went silent and he said, ‘That’s crazy. That’s the school my family attended’ and where, we would later find out, his father was born in the dormitory. So out of 139 schools in Canada, I happened to choose the one that Julian’s family attended and where his father’s life began, and that was the beginning of ‘Sugarcane.’”
“We didn’t set out to make a movie about me or my family at all. We set out to make a film about a cultural genocide that remains unknown and erased by the very society that committed it here in North America,” Brave NoiseCat said. “But ultimately, it felt like the right creative decision, and more importantly, the right personal and familial decision to go there with my story. … You know, the film is a vérité film. It’s not an archival, talking-head documentary. It’s set in the present that examines the enduring consequences of these institutions.”
“Black Box Diaries,” by contrast, was a personal project from the beginning: It is the story of how a prominent Japanese journalist allegedly drugged and raped Itō in a hotel room in 2015, but due to his connections with the then Japanese prime minister, was never so much as arrested, much less tried in court.
The likely cover-up was part of what inspired Itō, a journalist who wrote about her experience in a 2017 memoir also called “Black Box Diaries,” to document the traumatic story in a film. “If the case was taken in a way to support survivors and myself, if the police took the case or if other media investigative journalists were working to ask these powerful people who stopped the arrest, then I don’t think I [would have done] this investigation by myself,” she said. “But I was always hitting the wall [and] it was difficult for other people to find the truth, so I ended up documenting my own case.”
It was a tough road to travel. “Editing as director was something else. I had to relive all my own trauma that I wish I didn’t have to remember,” she said. “And we had over 450 hours of footage, so it was just like jumping fresh into my trauma and remembering to be able to organize it all and make it into 100 minutes to create this film. In the end, it was very therapeutic, but it was a hardcore therapy session, I would say.”
Though it chronicles an incident from the Cold War that took place before he was born, Grimonprez felt a personal connection to “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat,” about the state-sponsored murder of Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of the Republic of Congo after the country gained independence from Belgium in 1960. It intersects with how the U.S. State Department used prominent Black American jazz musicians as cultural ambassadors of democracy to the African continent while segregation held an iron grip on the States.
“It’s a black page out of the history of my own country,” said Grimonprez, who is from Belgium. “It’s a story that is still wiped under the carpet in my country.” Paraphrasing James Baldwin, he added, “History is not the past. History is now, how we are made up and that is still lingering today. … It’s about reparation and a situation that indeed happened 60 years ago, but what’s going on in the Congo is a direct result, in an exponential way, even worse, of what was set in motion 1960.
“And it’s similar for all the [nominated documentary features]. I have to give it to the Oscars that the doc branch actually chose five very provocative, political subject matters that I think should … be more prevalent in the Oscars.”
“Porcelain War” looks at the Russian invasion of Ukraine through the eyes of a Ukrainian artist, Slava Leontyev, who joins the military defense of his country, all while creating porcelain figures as an alternate means of resistance. The production team in the States helped smuggle cameras into Ukraine and over Zoom, co-director Brendan Bellomo taught Leontyev how to use them.
“They didn’t want to film destruction. They wanted to film beauty and what brings hope to them and what they’re fighting for,” DuPré Pesman said. “They created art with their cameras, and they really did show us the beauty of Ukraine and the beauty of the people and the people who are really stepping up at this really challenging time. Democracy is fragile. It’s fragile all around the world — and now more than ever. So I feel that this was a good way for us to use their art to show people to not turn away, to pay attention and keep our eyes forward.”
Brave NoiseCat saw similarities in how the films contend with tragedy. “The way that we went about our film — very similar to ‘Porcelain War’ and other films nominated — was to do it in a way that directly refuted that attempted genocide, that did not accept the premise that native people were backwards or dirty, that our way of life need to die. It was to it was to celebrate the art and the culture and the love that endures despite and against that history of colonization. It’s something very intentional, and it’s really important to see the parallels: Four out of five of the films are about imperialism this year too. There’s real strong through-lines here.”
