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.

Julian Brave NoiseCat, Emily Kassie, and Kellen Quinn at the 97th Academy Awards

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?

This is a question I always ask when considering a new project. In part, I rely on my initial reactions to materials or to the idea of a project – a gut sense that, if it stays with me for some days or weeks and prompts me to keep imagining the specifically cinematic possibilities of a story, becomes a conviction that there’s a film to be made. I experienced this intensely with SUGARCANE and then had numerous lengthy conversations with Emily and Julian to understand their approach and to help find a shared language for our collaboration. Although they both brought aspects of their journalistic practices to the project, they were keen from the outset to find a way to tell this story in distinctly cinematic forms.

There were numerous reasons to approach the investigation at St. Joseph’s Mission and the history of residential schools as a film, but the one that feels most crucial to me has to do with time and different timescales related to this particular story.

The investigation on the premises of St. Joseph’s (and, in parallel, a national reckoning across Canada) was the rapidly unfolding present tense of the film, which intersected with internal investigations undertaken by each of the film’s participants. These intertwined searches brought the past into the present and took us back into the past, a fluid interconnectivity through history that Julian and Emily identified early on as central to understanding the ongoing toll of the residential school system on Indigenous communities today as well as the resilience and vitality of Indigenous ways of life.

The durational aspect of the film, which was shot over two and a half years, offers a different way of engaging with time, one that allows viewers a way of experiencing the land, the rhythms of the community and the distinctive qualities of each of the participant’s journeys through this pivotal period.

Weaving these timescales together – seeing different kinds of change over time – allowed for emotional and spiritual truths to emerge from within the investigative mode of the film. I think this is how the story can enter people’s hearts, carrying the full weight of the factual and historical elements, but delivering them through an emotional and aesthetic experience.

The film explores the tragedies of multiple generations, not just one person’s story. How do you approach getting buy-in from an entire community? For example, even if a particular person in the community is not a subject in the film, their ancestors' story might be exposed for the first time.

We knew this was an important question from the beginning, and we approached it in several complementary ways, always alive to the fact that there was more to learn and understand.

The most fundamental thing, and perhaps the most important, was showing up again and again, which is what Emily, Julian and Chris (director of photography) did over the course of three years (including after principal photography was complete). The commitment to spending time with people and engaging in open and ongoing conversation is obviously central to developing trust, but it also deepened and enriched our understanding of different perspectives and considerations within the community. The effects of residential schools are as varied as the people who were sent to them and our decisions and practices needed to take that diversity into consideration.

In addition to seeking guidance from the community's leaders and elders, including WLFN’s council, we also drew on the wisdom and wishes of each participant because they all brought different sensitivities and interpersonal relationships that helped us find our way through profoundly important ethical questions. These things are never clean and perfect, but giving the process the time to follow the rhythms of the people most affected felt like the right path.

Before our theatrical release, we worked with WLFN to offer multiple screenings over three days in Williams Lake because we knew that it was essential for the community to see the film before it was widely available. It was an open invitation with mental health and spiritual support available for anyone who wanted them. This was one of the most powerful and important moments in the process of making the film, bringing it back to the community and letting people engage with it on their own terms.

We continue to work in this spirit on our impact campaign, which has brought the film to Indigenous communities across North America and will continue to do so in the year ahead.

When I interviewed Alysa Nahmias last year about producing WILDCAT, we discussed how they handled filming when someone is experiencing trauma on camera and what boundaries are set by filmmakers. In SUGARCANE, you had to deal with this as well, having moments on camera where people are reliving deeply emotional and disturbing parts of their past. How do you balance capturing these authentic moments while protecting the well-being of the people in your film?

I think a fundamental commitment not to put things out into the world that will harm people is the starting point. If the rapport in production is one of trust and sharing, you might sometimes film things that should never be in the film itself, but the act of filming isn't necessarily problematic. At the same time, some projects need very clear guidelines and ground rules for how and when the camera is used. In our case, we spoke extensively about our approach, but didn't make fixed rules, choosing instead to return to the questions again and again with new information and perspectives enriched by experience. This felt right because the film team was invited in by WLFN and because Julian is part of that community, with deep roots and enormous knowledge about the Secwépemc people and culture. In addition to Julian’s long-standing connections within the community, Emily and Chris, as the two people with cameras, each spent an enormous amount of time developing relationships outside of filming.

We were also fortunate to have the support and participation of community members who have traditional practices and knowledge to take care of people. For instance, the scene in which a boarding school survivor shares the horrific memory of witnessing a baby being thrown into the incinerator was shot with the presence of an elder who began and ended the visit to the man’s house with ceremony. Similarly, the scene in which elders shared their stories of abuse came from a meeting that Charlene and the community members organized so that everybody there understood the context of their storytelling.

Ongoing connection with participants is one of the most meaningful things, so people have the chance to voice concerns and ask questions. Sometimes the edit will forever be a little off in relation to what someone wanted, but a human relationship can allow that not to be the defining element of the whole experience.

At the Golden Globes, Brady Corbet, director of THE BRUTALIST said, "nobody asked for a movie like this" referring to his three-hour 1947 post-war period piece about an architect. I understand his point about believing in your film even when no one else does, but should we interrogate ‘nobody asked for this’ from an audience perspective? How do we get audiences to care about a movie like SUGARCANE that's really important, but dark and challenging material?

Films are obviously commercial products, but I don't think art begins with the question, "Is someone asking for this?" It often begins with someone or a group of people feeling like they need to make it. Each of us who joined this project felt compelled to do so.

At the same time, as a producer, I’m constantly thinking about who a film can reach and how. With SUGARCANE, I trusted that there was something special and distinctive about its combination of story, history and creative approach that would resonate with people in the industry and with audiences. We figured out our aims in making the film and tried to position it so those aims could be appreciated. We were fortunate that National Geographic Documentary Films understood SUGARCANE in the fullest sense – as creatively ambitious nonfiction cinema, as an urgent story for this moment and as a righting of historical record that can resonate and educate for years to come. The degree to which our path is increasingly rare is deeply sobering and I think our good fortune has to be contrasted with all the much more challenging situations that countless excellent films face now. I wish I had something more sweepingly positive to say, but the truth is that things are grim. I’m now trying to better grasp how to think about distribution in new ways and I have a lot to learn. I do continue to believe in audiences, though, as hard as it is to reach them.

SUGARCANE has been nominated for an Academy Award, which is such a huge accomplishment. I’m curious to know your thoughts on awards campaigns, which have become all-consuming and so expensive. Do you see it as a way to get the film in front of more people?

An awards campaign that succeeds in getting a film seen more broadly strikes me as very meaningful regardless of nominations and wins – and it’s a strategy that I’ve pursued, with varying degrees of success. But I truly wish it wasn’t the primary strategy that so many of us end up choosing as a way to deal with having little or no distribution. In our current decrepit situation, awards can be part of a multipronged approach to reaching audiences in the absence of a distributor, but I’m skeptical of putting everything on a campaign. There are definitely instances in which this has and will continue to work, but I worry that it’s fundamentally unsustainable and a misuse of scarce resources for many films.

At the same time, it's also deeply meaningful and encouraging to be recognized and celebrated by one's peers, so I can’t say the only value in awards is the instrumental one of increasing awareness and reaching audiences. But because awards campaigns are a business in and of themselves, everything is out of balance and resources for a campaign play an outsize role in determining which films get recognized. I guess I wish everything around awards could truly be more celebratory and simultaneously occupy less space in the industry.

I’m a member of the Academy’s Producer Branch so I see the inner workings of all the screenings and events that surround campaigns, but as someone who lives in Detroit, I can say very few people pay attention to awards season. Distributors must have data to show it's worth spending money, but I often wonder.

It would certainly be enlightening to understand more clearly how distributors determine the value of their spending on awards. I wish there was more transparency across the board because filmmakers and audiences alike could be better served than they are right now. I want to see more films without big distributors succeed in the awards realm to encourage funders and distributors to take more risks, but I also think that distributors’ focus on awards to the exclusion of almost anything else is symptomatic of a larger set of problems in the industry that we’re all constantly talking about and grappling with. I definitely don’t have answers, but I’m learning from the work that a lot of folks are doing on audience and distribution questions because the experience we’ve enjoyed in working with National Geographic on SUGARCANE is amazing, but vanishingly rare. I’m also finding that it’s very tough to tackle these questions as an independent producer. There’s a complicated tension between being entrepreneurial and wanting to work in an industry that’s financially sustainable for the people who comprise it. Right now, the success of any given film doesn’t seem like it contributes to the overall health and wellbeing of the industry.

On a more personal note, in addition to an Oscar nomination, you're also a new dad. How has that journey been for you, balancing life as a producer at this high moment in your career while also starting a family?

I'm truly trying to figure that out and don't have answers, but it's helped put certain things in perspective. It's making me focus more on trying to understand what I love and what I really want as a producer. I can't flip a switch and have everything change, but I can progressively do more of what I love and find better ways to get support around the other aspects. I guess I'm teaching myself more and more that I don't have to do everything, even if I, like many producers, often approach the work that way. I’m practicing a looser grip, steering with my eyes on the horizon, partially so that I have time and energy for things outside the work and partially so that I can be more engaged with my filmmaking community, which is, like the whole world right now, facing some truly staggering challenges and uncertainties.