Kellen Quinn on Producing Academy Award Nominated SUGARCANE
By Rebecca Green
As a producer of SUGARCANE, one of this year's most celebrated documentaries, Kellen Quinn faced unique challenges in helping tell the story of Canada's residential schools and their devastating impact on Indigenous communities. In this conversation with Dear Producer, Kellen discusses the delicate balance of documenting trauma, building trust with communities, and the role of documentary film in bringing hidden histories to light. Nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, SUGARCANE demonstrates how careful, thoughtful filmmaking can help communities process their past while reaching broader audiences.
With documentaries, there are many different stages where producers can get involved. When did you join SUGARCANE?
I got involved when directors Emily Kassie and Julian Brave NoiseCat reached out to me in late 2021, several months after they began shooting. Emily originated the project and had been doing all of the producing up to that point, while also shooting with director of photography, Chris LaMarca. Chris encouraged them to look for an experienced producer to support the team as this was their first feature as directors.
They sent me a deck and sample material from their first shoots and I was deeply taken with the visual language they were developing, which already showed clarity of vision and ambitious, creative ideas.
I was also stunned at how little I knew about this fundamental part of North American history, how Indian residential schools in Canada and a similar system of boarding schools in the United States were central to government and Church-led efforts to eradicate, assimilate and destroy Indigenous ways of life.
I immediately felt that I had a lot to learn in joining the project – and that I could offer something meaningful to the team.
The story explores a community of people several generations deep. Was there one particular character who was the entry point in being allowed access to tell this story?
There was actually such an unlikely confluence of paths and events at the start of this film that Emily and Julian often describe it as somehow brought about by forces greater than we can comprehend.
Emily began research for the project shortly after the first reports of potential unmarked graves at the residential school in Kamloops, British Columbia. Having read that Williams Lake First Nation (WLFN) was planning to investigate the residential school where children from their community were sent, she emailed Chief Willie Sellars. Simultaneously, she reached out to Julian about collaborating. Emily and Julian had met a decade before as early-career journalists and she had long wanted to work with him. Chief Willie responded quickly because he and WLFN’s Council had just been discussing how they might document the search. In short order, Emily and WLFN had an agreement in place.
When Julian got back to Emily a few weeks later, she told him she had access to follow WLFN’s investigation and he was blown away. Of the 139 Indian residential schools in Canada, Emily had unknowingly landed on the one that Julian’s family had been sent to and where his father was born.
On the very first trip Emily took to Williams Lake, she met participants Charlene Belleau, Chief Willie, and Rick Gilbert all within the first days she was there. They were part of the group deciding how to approach the investigation. She had a sense that each would play a part in the film, but exactly how that came to be unfolded over a much longer period.
As for Julian’s participation in the film, Charlene knew he would end up in front of the camera before he himself did. Watching Rick begin to open up about his past, and seeing how the community was thinking about these questions, Julian began to feel there was an important story for him to tell – alongside his dad – and he ultimately chose to be a participant as well as director.
Given Emily and Julian’s background in journalism, how did you determine that this needed to be a film rather than a piece for The Washington Post or a podcast?