TIFTY TWOFERS: TIFF 2025 REVIEWS
Meadowlarks and Blood Lines are two deeply personal, intimate examinations of individual and intergenerational traumas stemming from the Sixties Scoop, and are particularly prescient in a cultural moment in which far too many seek to tick off Truth and Reconciliation as a completed project on Canada’s to-do list.
By Tamar Hanstke
Today, we are facing a disturbing trend in Canada wherein far too many citizens openly discredit our country’s Truth and Reconciliation efforts as no longer relevant or necessary. As time marches forward, Canada’s brutal history of colonialism is continually being flattened in the public imaginary and relegated to history books, making it far too easy to forget how recently much of this history really took place. Tasha Hubbard’s Meadowlarks and Gail Maurice’s Blood Lines are powerful revolts against this forgetting, reminding viewers that the personal and cultural devastations of the Sixties Scoop–and iterations of it continuing long post the 1960s–still cast a heavy shadow over Canadian culture and society, a permanent and inescapable wound on the nation’s history that still gapes open despite so many callous attempts by non-Indigenous Canadians to declare it healed.
Meadowlarks is a fictional film partially based on Hubbard’s 2017 documentary Birth of a Family (which I have not yet had the pleasure of viewing), and follows four Indigenous siblings coming together for a holiday weekend in Banff. As child victims of the Sixties Scoop, they were snatched from their parents one by one, and then rehomed with white families primed to assimilate the children into the dominant colonial culture; as such, several of the siblings are meeting each other in-person for the very first time. The film’s opening scenes come off somewhat stilted and awkward, as if the actors are still settling into their roles; yet, this effectively mirrors the affective experience of the characters themselves, both desperate for familial connection and also afraid of facing their feelings of loss and grief for all that their family has lost. As a result, the somewhat shaky opening makes the film’s emotional unfolding all the more rewarding, as Hubbard deftly provides each of the siblings with their own character arc that is meaningfully impacted by each of the other siblings, a particularly impressive feat given the film’s taut 91-minute running time.
I was especially appreciative of how the film develops diverse and realistic sibling connections between each pair of characters, with some connecting on a deeper level, and others experiencing friction, as in a tense early moment when Alex Rice’s character brings a bottle of wine as a gift for the siblings to share, unintentionally distressing her sister played by Michelle Thrush—a woman in recovery from an alcohol use disorder. By contrast, in a particularly heartfelt moment, Michael Greyeyes—playing the eldest sibling—opens up to Alex Rice’s character about his failure to live up to the stereotypical role of “big brother” to one of their other sisters in an earlier scene, and his shame at not knowing how to be that kind of strong, protective, all-knowing figure for his sisters. She responds with love and empathy: both for the man, her brother, standing before her; and for the boy he once was, too old at the time of being scooped to be a desirable child for adoption, and so was shuffled from foster home to foster home until he was finally kept by a family who needed free labour on their farm. She emphasizes that the root of shame is not located in his internal struggle to be a good big brother, but rather in all of them being separated in the first place, denying Rice the opportunity to comfort her brother as he waited, alone, in a driveway with all of his earthly belongings in a garbage bag, to be taken to his next foster home.
And this is merely the childhood trauma that Greyeyes’ character can open up about—there is, in fact, a fifth sibling, another brother who was scooped at the same time as Greyeyes, who cannot be convinced to join the weekend reunion or share his story at all. Played by Lorne Duquette in a single scene taking place via phone call, his absence nonetheless weighs heavily over the film; and even as the four present siblings excitedly discuss meeting places for future family reunions, and they retain a linger that their fifth sibling may have a change of heart by then, the film denies any comforting reassurance of this. While the film ends on a note of hope and familial reconnection, there is no forgetting the decades this family has lost.
Blood Lines explores similar themes to Meadowlark, though this narrative is more strongly driven by the pathos of melodrama than the more grounded realism of the former film. While I attended the press screening without talent present, I have heard reports from those who attended the Q&A with Maurice that this film, like Meadowlarks, is partially based upon real events, proving that the ongoing legacy of the Sixties Scoop is even more horrific than what viewers would tend to expect from their fiction.
In this film, touted in press emails as “a lesbian romance wrapped up in a celebration of Métis culture”, Métis protagonist Beatrice–played by Dana Solomon–is suddenly faced with two major life events: the return of her long-absent mother, played by director Gail Maurice herself, who is in recovery from a decades-long alcohol use disorder; and a burgeoning romantic relationship with newcomer to town, Chani, played by Derica Lafrance. Beatrice and Chani are of a succeeding generation from the protagonists in Meadowlarks, born decades after the initial waves of the Sixties Scoop, yet their lives have been irreparably harmed by the same traumas: Beatrice was raised by her grandparents, with little-to-no contact with her mother past age 6, because of her mother’s fear that her alcohol use disorder might compel the government to take Beatrice away for placement in a white “adoptive” family; while Chani was adopted by a white family at birth, potentially experiencing exactly what Beatrice’s mother sought to protect her own daughter from. Chani’s story is both a familiar adoption narrative of a young adult seeking out her birth mother, while also introducing more culturally specific concerns, as Chani reckons with the way she has been entirely cut off from her native culture. Over the course of the film, she actively seeks to learn about this missing part of her life and familial history, and becomes committed to engaging in her lost culture regardless of whether she ever finds her birth mother. Her relationship with Beatrice is particularly valuable to this pursuit, as in a lovely sequence where Beatrice brings Chani to Métis Days, a festival where Chani can learn about and engage in cultural practices firsthand—with Beatrice providing gentle, loving guidance for the parts Chani still does not understand. Always on the sidelines of this burgeoning love story is a group of elderly women in Beatrice’s Métis community, affectionately known as the “Granny Gang”. Acting as a sort of comedic Greek Chorus, they arrive on the scene during many moments of conflict to offer advice to Beatrice and a moment of playful levity for the viewing audience.
This playful levity hits up against a dramatic late-film plot twist that will inevitably colour viewers’ lasting impressions of the film. In the press notes for the film, Maurice explains her personal reasons for this unexpected turn in the plot, rooted in her own losses as a result of the Sixties Scoop and its aftermath. One might ultimately walk away with the sense that Blood Lines tries to tackle one too many difficult topics, and particularly one that draws attention away from the film’s emotional core, the relationship between Beatrice and Chani, and the ways in which this relationship allows Chani to reconnect with her Métis heritage. Nonetheless, the film’s strengths emerge clearly out of Maurice’s distinctive directorial vision, and continue to establish her as a Canadian director to follow in the years to come.
Taken together, Meadowlarks and Blood Lines are two deeply personal, intimate examinations of individual and intergenerational traumas stemming from the Sixties Scoop, and are particularly prescient in a cultural moment in which far too many seek to tick off Truth and Reconciliation as a completed project on Canada’s to-do list. Earlier this year, in March of 2025, I had the pleasure of attending a film screening that included a Q&A with First Nations Canadian arts journalist and chairperson of the Canada Council for the Arts, Jesse Wente. Near the end of the evening, in response to annexation threats from the American political administration and the renewed national desire to build up a sense of Canadian identity, Wente suggested that the most profound act to differentiate Canadian identity from American identity would be to wholeheartedly commit—or re-commit—to Truth and Reconciliation efforts. Meadowlarks and Blood Lines offer compelling, loosely fictionalized narratives that affirm the truth of Wente’s proposition and call each of us to make a choice about the kind of national Canadian identity we want to establish for the future.
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