Separation anxiety

In her documentary work, Alberta filmmaker Tasha Hubbard has never had a shortage of things to say.

And she has said them with fiery conviction in films such as Singing Back the Buffalo — which links the deliberate destruction of the buffalo to the deliberate genocide of Indigenous people — or Nîpawistamâsowin: We Will Stand Up, an angry condemnation of the justice system following the 2016 shooting of Colten Boushie in rural Saskatchewan.

Making her debut in the realm of drama, Hubbard revisits the premise of her 2017 National Film Board doc The Birth of a Family, which saw a reunion of four siblings cruelly separated during the ’60s Scoop, a shameful episode of Canadian history that saw more than 20,000 First Nations children taken from their families and placed for adoption in mostly non-Indigenous households.

Scripted by Hubbard and playwright Emil Sher, the drama maintains the premise but erases the documentary crew and reinvents the family.

The instigator is Connie (Carmen Moore), the eldest sister of the five Cree kids adopted out 50 years earlier. Her older brother Anthony (Michael Greyeyes) approaches a reunion in Banff as an opportunity to fill in the blanks of his family history, for the sake of his expectant daughter as much as for himself.

Marianne (Alex Rice) was adopted to a family in Belgium; she admits she has “a nice life in Antwerp” and finds the Cree culture foreign. But she also has a compelling need to connect with her blood family.

The most troubled sister, Gwen (Michelle Thrush), had the roughest upbringing, and is the only sibling to have had her own children taken from her. Befitting her past, her journey will be the hardest.

Hubbard herself was a child of the ’60s Scoop and addresses the trauma with hard-won wisdom and unerring compassion for her characters.

Meadowlarks will likely be perceived as a heavy melodrama, as if that were a bad thing. Really, what else could it be?

Hubbard revisits the Rocky Mountains setting with an understanding that a big beautiful background is appropriate for the outsize emotions on display.

Like most Canadian dramas, it could have used a leavening of humour. The closest it gets is a nice throwaway moment when Connie tells of a traumatic moment from her childhood when her adoptive brother said something especially vicious and threw her doll out a window. A minute later, we see her on the phone with that befuddled brother, calling out his cruelty 45 years after the fact, a dead-accurate detail for anyone who ever had a sister.

Meadowlarks earns its tears, both from the characters and, inevitably, from the audience.

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