Strangers in Good Company

The Company of Strangers (US release title: Strangers in Good Company; French title: Le Fabuleux gang des sept) is a Canadian film, released in 1990. It was directed by Cynthia Scott, and written by Scott, Sally Bochner, David Wilson and Gloria Demers. The film depicts eight women on a bus tour, who are stranded at an isolated cottage when the bus breaks down. Created in a genre defined as docufiction, semi-documentary/semi-fiction, the film is not tightly scripted. The writers wrote a basic story outline but allowed the eight women to improvise their dialogue. Each of the women, all but one of whom were senior citizens, told stories from her own life. A major theme of the film is how the elderly women each face aging and mortality in their own way, and find the courage together to persevere. At various points throughout the film, a montage of photos from each woman's life is shown. The women are: Alice Diabo, 74, a Mohawk elder from Kahnawake, Quebec, Constance Garneau, 88, born in the United States and brought to Quebec by her family as a child, Winifred Holden, 76, an Englishwoman who moved to Montreal after World War II, Cissy Meddings, 76, who was born in England and moved to Canada in 1981, Mary Meigs, 74, a noted feminist writer and painter, Catherine Roche, 68, a Roman Catholic nun, Michelle Sweeney, 27, a jazz singer and the bus trip's tour guide, Beth Webber, 80, who was born in England and moved to Montreal in 1930.Meigs published a book about her experiences making the film, In the Company of Strangers, in 1991.