The Oscar nominated documentary feature Sugarcane from NatGeo Films is a groundbreaking investigation into an Indian residential school, shedding light on years of forced separation, horrifying deaths that were discovered there, assimilation and abuse of indigenous children involving the hands of the church and the government. It comes from directors Emily Kassie and Julian Brave NoiseCat, the latter also a subject of the film who discovered his own family history was directly impacted in these events uncovered not long ago in 2021.
Jesse Eisenberg has been Oscar Nominated for his Original Screenplay of Searchlight’s A Real Pain, the comedy/drama film he also directed which depicts a wild road trip for two cousins (Eisenberg and Oscar nominated Kieran Culkin play them) who travel back to Poland to discover the truth of their family and the Holocaust.
Kieran Culkin and Jesse Eisenberg co-star in ‘A Real Pain’
Searchlight Pictures
Both these films, in their own very distinct ways, deal with generational trauma, and on different levels even using humor mixed with strong emotions and feelings in stories that can’t be easily categorized. And so for this unique edition of Deadline’s The Back/Story, we have brought them together (call it SugarPain) in this virtual conversation Pete Hammond moderates with Kassie, NoiseCat, and Eisenberg to discuss what is clearly the universality of younger generations trying to come to terms with the painful truths of their families past. Eisenberg has no connection to Sugarcane other than being a genuine admirer of the film. Both NatGeo and Searchlight are under the Disney umbrella of studios.
‘Sugarcane’
Christopher LaMarca/Sugarcane Film LLC/National Geographic
Eisenberg explains the direct relationship he sees in the two films. “You’re trying to kind of articulate and codify the actual shame and internalized shame and repression and struggling to kind of articulate your feelings. And it’s the same in what I just recognize as something in my family too. Like my family, you’re talking about abandonment and, my family maybe could appreciate this too, there was just deep paranoia. Emily and I have talked about this a little bit. in my family and I think Emily’s too, the paranoid people were the ones who survived. They were the ones who like left before a pogrom. They were the ones who left before the Holocaust. They were the ones who know to leave the suburb when the golf course turns, you know, anti-Semitic, whatever, ” he said acknowledging Kassie’s similar Jewish family roots.
“So like in my like family history, and it’s not as recent and not as directly tragic to me, so forgive me for associating myself with your trauma, Julian, but there’s a trickling down of something not good. And it’s not our fault, the way it’s not your fault, but you’re the recipients of this pain. And that kind of generational perpetuation of this kind of suffering rings so heartbreakingly true in yours. And in mine there’s a similar thing where Kieran’s character is just the recipient of all of this grief, and he doesn’t know where to put it. And he can’t fend for himself. And it just rang so true. And it just occurs to me that when you’re part of a small group, and again forgive me for associating my culture with your culture because the circumstances are quite different, you know there are going to be people who hate you, and there’s going to be a hegemony that kind of exploits you or whatever. And so there’s something so sweetly similar.”
Kassie describes the similarities she found in both films. “Julian and I loved A Real Pain. My sister and I and my mom actually went on this trip called March Of The Living where you go through Poland and you look at all the Holocaust sites, you go to Auschwitz, and it’s this whole kind of trauma tour in a way,” she said about her own similar experience to what happens in Eisenberg’s film. “And you’re also with this kind of rag tag bunch of people who you don’t know who are of different generations and there’s a lot of conflict. And actually my sister texted me after watching (A Real Pain) and was like ‘you’re Kieran and I’m Jesse’ . And I thought that the themes of just intergenerational trauma, how we deal with those things, what we keep bottled up, the silences that permeate our families. And also this kind of feeling of the road trip and, you know, two family members like Julian and Ed (in Sugarcane) going somewhere searching for something and trying to find a way to love each other despite what’s come between them were parallels that really resonated between the two films and of course, for me personally.”
Click on the link above to watch the whole video conversation.