Tasha Hubbard’s debut fiction work is a clear-eyed, frustrating compound of incomplete scenes and rounded emotional resonance, where characters speak in terms defined either by stilted exposition or historical exorcism. It’s quite early on that Meadowlarks defines its terms, where in a brief conversation between four estranged siblings — coming together in Banff for the first time since their forced separation during the ‘60s Scoop — it’s underlined that the translation of their family name, Wasepscan, renders out to the titular songbird. Naturally unfurling from this point are discourses on family, the violences of colonial intervention, and the alienation inherent in the dissociation from one’s culture: the existential vacuum that bleeds the absence of language, ceremony, and understanding. Hubbard doesn’t quite manage to cohere all of these pieces into a total work, fussily cutting to and fro between scenes that take on the role of structural mediator between more fleshed-out expressions of interpersonal reconciliation.
It’s not difficult to discern this either, for so many of these moments are curt and far too concise to hold the weight of their dramaturgy. It’s jarring to push through a less than two-minute articulation of unrest and into a near ten-minute group share of personal histories and familial strife. This dramatic amorphousness is further implicated by a visual language with a rudimentary decoupage that proffers no insight into any single circumstance, any single character, or any single dynamic: everything is both immediately legible and spelled out in explicit pronouncement across the entire runtime. Apart from a single scene where the family is invited to sit down with a local Indigenous couple and their son — a scene that itself is still plagued by the languishing syntax of coverage, with the only semblance of an animated soul existing in its insistence for direct address of both a settler-colonial history and its traumas — there’s little else that manages persist past the film’s shortcomings.
A cinematic inertness hampers the film’s capacity to carry its narration, but it would also be unfair to reject outright the stirring confrontation that grounds its haphazard formalism. But even then, the project’s screenplay seems aloof to its own representation of the relationship dynamics within this family. Beyond what’s been touched upon above, there’s a single aspect regarding the fifth sibling — the eldest, most discomforted, whose capacity to recollect the scoops as they occurred situates him in an isolation rooted in experience — where his refusal to join this reunion introduces a complication to the processes of reckoning, a thread which would have undoubtedly proved effectual than much of the pointed exposition. This presence — and absence — understandably caught in the periphery, should have been a more substantial part of the whole, and its wedged-in position is indicative of much of the work’s more contrived register.
Of course, to some degree these ailments are a product of the difficulty in adapting a documentary to fiction, where the expected structure of classical narrativity is enforced onto a story that is anything but amenable to these constrictions. This decades-spanning tale of forced separation, from both family and culture — the consequential, bureaucratic amalgamation of hundreds of years worth of settler-colonial oppression and dispossession — cannot be represented through the structures that helped to ideologically affirm these very acts of violence. While it is understood that this is not the response many will have to these narratives being finally represented, regardless, their representation here doesn’t quite break free of the colonial gaze that harbours itself through these classical formalisms. Such a cinema is already out there, and it will take the continued praxis of deindustrialization, on both a personal and systemic level, to remove this yoke where the imagination is latched onto colonial hegemony.
Published as part of TIFF 2025 — Dispatch 2.
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