This week on Someone Else’s Movie, I’m joined by writer and director Tasha Hubbard, who shifts from documentaries to dramatic features with her new film Meadowlarks, opening across Canada this Friday.

It’s an adaptation of sorts of Tasha’s 2017 doc Birth of a Family (which is streaming at the NFB’s website), with Michael Greyeyes, Carmen Moore, Alex Rice and Michelle Thrush as adult siblings reuniting in Banff decades after being separated from their parents — and each other — in the Sixties Scoop.

Meadowlarks is small, quiet and profoundly felt, using the spectacular backdrop of Banff as a subtle way of reminding us about the colonial origins of Canada, and how much work still needs to be done to heal both the land and its people. And I wish I’d thought of that when we were recording Tasha’s episode, because the film she chose — Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone — is similarly about using a specific landscape as an element of the story. In that film, it’s the sparse rural environment of the Ozarks, where Jennifer Lawrence’s Ree tries to save her own family by tracking down her missing father. The tension and urgency of Granik’s thriller couldn’t seem more different from Tasha’s more thoughtful cinema, but the two directors are connected in more ways than one, and we dig into that over the course of the episode.

(Except for the Banff thing, dammit.)

You’re gonna listen, right? Subscribe to the show on Apple, Spotify, YouTube Podcasts or your podcatcher of choice, or just download the episode directly from the web and listen to it while you race from one house to another in search of an answer you don’t  really want to find.

There’s a lot of ground to cover over at Shiny Things, too; over the last week I’ve covered the new releases of Universal Language,  Splitsville,  Together,  Red Sonja and Him, as well as Criterion’s special edition of Howard Hughes’ Hell’s Angels and Shout! Select’s 4K upgrade of Oliver Stone’s Snowden. All good stuff! (Well, except maybe for Him. That one’s a mess.) And there’s more coming … so why not subscribe and get each newsletter as soon as it’s released? It’ll save you all that clicking!