The Government of Manitoba

Family secrets surface when a married couple returns to the husband’s hometown, where his overbearing family interferes with their imagined new start.

Jo Beckett leads a comfortable life with a successful veterinary practice, a devoted husband, and a beautiful home in a lovely small town outside of Boston. Still, she is strangely dissatisfied with her life. One afternoon, a man brings his dog into her veterinary practice to be treated, and Jo recognizes him as Eli, a former housemate from her bohemian days more than 20 years ago. When he invites her to lunch at a fancy hotel in Boston, she goes with the intention of sleeping with him. Instead, Eli reveals a secret to Jo that returns her to the darkest moments of her past and threatens to destroy life as she knows it.

Part of the Daughters of the Country series, this film, set in the 1850s, unfolds against the backdrop of the Hudson's Bay Company's monopoly of the fur trade. In protest, some Métis engage in trade with the Americans. Madeleine, the Métis common-law wife of a Hudson's Bay Company clerk, is torn between loyalty to her husband and loyalty to her brother, a freetrader. Even more shattering, a change in company policy destroys Madeleine's happy and secure life, forcing her to re-evaluate her identity.