TIFF25 REVIEW: Meadowlarks [20XX]

Rating: NR | Runtime: 91 minutes
Studio: Mongrel Media
Director(s): Tasha Hubbard
Writer(s): Tasha Hubbard & Emil Sher / Tasha Hubbard (inspired by documentary Birth of a Family)

You are each other’s pieces.

The general assumption is that indigenous actors are mostly offered stereotypical roles within white-led productions. And like with so many minorities, those filmmakers often demand a one-dimensional caricature of their race rather than a three-dimensional projection of their authentic selves. So, of course, Tasha Hubbard’s fictional narrative debut Meadowlarks (inspired by her documentary Birth of a Family) would cause its cast pause and process its undertaking within that context. Here’s a film produced and directed by indigenous artists and they’re being asked to play characters fully disconnected from their culture.

It’s ironic in the bigger picture sense of the film industry, but crucial to the story Hubbard and co-writer Emil Sher have crafted since the reason for that disconnect is a traumatic one only indigenous North Americans could fully understand. Because neither Anthony (Michael Greyeyes), Gwen (Michelle Thrush), Marianne (Alex Rice), nor Connie (Carmen Moore) chose to forsake their heritage. This isn’t an immigrant tale about assimilation and homogenization. No, these four siblings were torn from their home and forced to experience the loneliness, shame, and rage conjured from being victim of the “Sixties Scoop.”

Here they are forty some years later and it’s as though they’re meeting for the first time since most of them were too young to remember life before social workers picked them up and shipped them off. You can’t therefore call Marianne “lucky” for having been placed with a loving family in Antwerp because a great new life doesn’t erase the void left from never knowing the life stolen from her. The same goes for Connie considering comfort with a white family still meant ridicule from her adoptive brothers and the constant threat of wondering if one mistake might mean having to leave them too.

Their only luck was having been young enough at the point of their extraction to still be wanted. Because Anthony and Gwen weren’t. They were bounced around foster homes. They were traumatized again and again by the government, the Canadian populace, and their own feelings of inadequacy born from this cycle of rejection. And even they might not have endured the worst of it. No, their older brother George refuses to take part in this reunion at all (a word they question considering it means they’ve been united previously). We’re talking about deep emotional scars that one weekend cannot wash away.

What it can provide, however, is a start by opening a path towards healing. It won’t be easy since they’re all at differing stages of coping with what happened and reconciling their fractured identities (Marianne’s athletic success allowed her to fully embrace being Belgian, Connie was always told a desire to learn about her roots would destroy her adoptive parents, Anthony’s discovery that he’s going to be a grandfather puts him into overdrive as far as returning to that part of him that provided so much pain, and Gwen still can’t quite articulate what she survived), but who better to trust than each other?

The script does a wonderful job balancing the routine small talk of sharing life stories and the debilitating and often unspeakable suffering they’ve either kept bottled inside or didn’t even know existed until right now. I won’t deny that things can get overly schmaltzy when this foursome overcompensates for lost time, but that’s merely a byproduct of their wounds being so devastating. We need that over-the-top, tearful pouting to shake us from the gut-punch of emotion dealt whenever one of them reveals a new dark truth or sheepishly admits to wanting to know more about who they are without really knowing where to start.

Because the damage is permanent and its modes of delivery infinite. The sheer act of being taken. The cruelty of being othered in a setting they’ve been forced to reside within. The hypocrisy of a government that saw them as property to be given away without a second thought about the ramifications. The reality that their pain would ultimately be passed down to their own children. The sense that they don’t belong in the one place they should despite still not belonging in the only place they’ve known. It all pours out via music, photos, personality quirks, and heartfelt admissions over phones, to each other, and to themselves.

And then there’s also a kindly older couple on the reservation outside of the tourist trap that is their Banff, Alberta getaway. Alma (Theda Newbreast) and Simon (Russell Badger) become critical pieces to this puzzle by becoming an extension of what this weekend represents insofar as inclusion, acceptance, and understanding. Because it’s one thing to find family through marriage and another to reclaim family through blood. But there’s still that lingering question about rediscovering community with their ancestors. It’s no small thing when this couple invites them into their circle to assure them that they do belong.

That’s when the floodgates truly open. When all the things they’ve still been too embarrassed to admit comes out. So, don’t think yourself strong or Meadowlarks tame because you didn’t feel the full force of the love and anguish onscreen before then. There are more horrors left to endure as the full breadth of the “Sixties Scoop” (an estimated 25,000 First Nations, Métis, and Inuit infants and children displaced by child welfare authorities over thirty-plus years) comes into focus. But there’s also a lot more healing as these siblings recognize they mustn’t confront their nightmares alone anymore.