How to load .env from a different location?

[Irfy]

I would like to use podman-compose with a single podman-compose.yaml file but different .env files for different configurations. However, podman-compose looks for .env file in the same location where the .yaml file is located (probably as a default of the python-dotenv module).

How can I instruct podman-compose to load a .env file from a different location?

There is --env-file in the source code, but this seems to only be used for building the arguments to podman. But I need a custom .env during podman-compose execution (e.g. to select the proper image), not during podman.