Shift from docs to drama brings challenges

With Meadowlarks, filmmaker Tasha Hubbard is, in a way, telling the same story twice.

The Alberta-based Hubbard, a seasoned documentarian (Singing Back the Buffalo, Nîpawistamâsowin: We Will Stand Up), is making her narrative feature debut with Meadowlarks.

The drama is about a reunion of four Cree siblings, separated in their early childhood by the ’60s Scoop, a cultural cataclysm that saw more than 20,000 First Nations children ripped from their families and placed for adoption in mostly non-Indigenous households.

The four siblings, played by Michael Greyeyes, Carmen Moore, Alex Rice and Michelle Thrush, meet over a holiday weekend in Banff and tentatively try to connect as a family after decades of separation.

If that premise sounds familiar, it’s because it’s also the story of Hubbard’s 2017 National Film Board doc Birth of a Family.

That film explored a real-life family coming together in Alberta to get caught up on their shared, exploded history. Hubbard says the feature drama, which she co-wrote with playwright Emil Sher (Hana’s Suitcase), allowed an expansion of the first movie’s themes; Betty Ann Adam, the eldest sibling in Birth of a Family, signed on as executive producer to the new iteration.

Hubbard was also a child of the ’60s Scoop, and the drama allowed her to have her own interpretations.

“I think the documentary was not mine to say,” Hubbard says in a Zoom interview.

“I think the documentary was the family and Betty Ann Adam and what they chose, and I very much gave them that agency to what they wanted to say. I was a privileged witness in that film and it was beautiful and profound.”

Hubbard says one of the film’s producers, Julia Rosenberg, approached her with the idea of turning the doc into a drama; she agreed that there was more to explore.

“And also, there was a path forward for us in the sense of characters who, in this short time, have these moments of growth and healing and awareness,” she says. “I thought, I can really lean in with these fictional characters that are representative of people that I’ve met over the years.”

Including herself?

“Yes, there’s elements. It’s not like my own experience per se, because I think mine was maybe not the typical (experience). It’s more of my own emotional and psychological reflection that I’ve had over years that are in the script,” Hubbard says.

Shifting from documentary to drama presented its own challenge. Working with actors was new to Hubbard and she knew there were aspects of her direction she needed to work on before she could give her cast what they needed from her.

“It (requires) different muscles, but also, I would say the unpredictability of documentary, because of the preparedness, the multitasking that comes with documentary, really served me well, on set. Being able to just focus on creative was a joy,” she says.

“I still want to make docs and I miss it and I love it, but I also saw what was really lovely and fun about drama.”

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