For director Tara Johns, her debut feature The Year Dolly Parton Was My Mom could really be considered a pan-Canadian film. “I’ve never felt more Canadian than when I was making this film,” says the filmmaker, who would describe her own identity as pan-Canadian too. “I feel it’s an expression of where I came from, but also where I am now.”

A self-professed “Prairie girl at heart” who was raised in Alberta and Saskatchewan, Johns spent 14 of 29 shooting days filming her debut feature, The Year Dolly Parton Was My Mom, in Manitoba last spring, with a crew from Quebec. The rest of the film was shot in Montreal, making the film a true interprovincial production.

Now out on DVD, the movie was selected to close both the Rendez-vous du Cinéma Québécois this past spring and, more recently, the inaugural Eastern Townships Film Festival this past August. For Johns, this has been a culmination of both a personal and literal journey, spanning the country’s eastern and western halves — a “manifestation of the Trudeauian dream.”

“While from the Prairies, I always had a need and desire to speak French and know Quebec,” she says. “I certainly feel this movie is a very western Canadian film, it being set in Manitoba — yet I can’t help but be influenced by the cultural humidity of Quebec.” (Certainly Claudine Sauve’s rich, dense cinematography evokes other recent Quebec productions, such as 2010’s moody Curling.)

The Year Dolly Parton Was My Mom concerns the pre-teen Elizabeth (Julia Sarah Stone), who in 1970s Winnipeg becomes convinced her mom is actually the titular country music star. After an enormous family secret is revealed at home, she hops on her bike and attempts to ride to meet Parton in Minneapolis.

It was in an imaginative “flash” that the premise first came to Johns. “I was looking for an idea for a short, and had an image of a mother and daughter driving in a car,” she says. The experience cross–pollinated with Johns’s own childhood “what-if?” musings concerning Canadian icon Joni Mitchell — a friend of her mother’s. “I especially wondered whether Mitchell could, you know, possibly maybe be my mom after I learned she’d given up a daughter for adoption.”

But then Johns heard the real Parton on the radio — the first time the filmmaker had heard the singer speaking. “I found her strong and feminist, in addition to being feminine,” Johns says. “She was a paradox that way. She certainly would have been a good role model for me when I was 10 or 11.”

Johns admits that she didn’t have Winnipeg in mind while first writing the script — even though she always entertained a prairie setting. She’d only been to the city on one previous occasion, when she’d been stuck in a motel on the outskirts. Yet she was amazed at how Manitoba “felt so much like home” — despite Manitobans proving themselves of slightly different stock from Saskatchewanians, as well as Albertans. “They have a dry sense of humour that I love,” she laughs. “But all Prairie people share a certain pragmatism, I find. I feel very affected by this part of the country. While we were making the film I thought, ‘Man! I could live here!’ If I didn’t have a family, that is.... I guess you can’t totally leave a place.”