The Company of Strangers

The Company of Strangers
DVD cover (United States)
Directed byCynthia Scott
Written byGloria Demers
Cynthia Scott
David Wilson
Sally Bochner
Produced byDavid Wilson
StarringAlice Diabo
Constance Garneau
CinematographyDavid De Volpi
Edited byDavid Wilson
Music byMarie Bernard
Production
company
Distributed byFirst Run Features
Castle Hill Productions
National Film Board of Canada
Release date
  • 1990 (1990)
Running time
101 min.
CountryCanada
LanguageEnglish

The Company of Strangers (US release title: Strangers in Good Company; French title: Le Fabuleux gang des sept[2]) is a 1990 Canadian film 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,[3] 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.

  1. ^ "Strangers in Good Company". Austin Chronicle. October 11, 1991. Retrieved July 22, 2022.
  2. ^ Angela Stukator. "The Company of Strangers". The Canadian Encyclopedia. Retrieved October 7, 2019.
  3. ^ Diana, George. Semi-Documentary/Semi-Fiction: An Examination of Genre in "Strangers in Good Company". Journal of Film and Video, v46 n4 p24-30 Win 1995