Hot Doc 2017: Birth of a Family

Tasha Hubbard’s Birth of a Family documents the first meeting of a family torn asunder by racist government policies, decades after their separation.  As infants, Betty Ann, Esther, Rosalie, and Ben were taken from their indigenous mother and placed into separate white homes across North America as part of Canada’s “Sixties Scoop”.  The story of Birth of a Family is a story of cultural identity, family, and the unintended consequences of the “good” intentions of those in charge.

The film covers only a single week.  Though in their fifties and sixties, the family members have never all met, as it was very common for information on the children of the Sixties Scoop to be sparse or unavailable.  Now that they have found each other, they are spending a week in Bannf National Park to visit and share stories about their upbringing and memories of their mother.  They also want to…