STRANGERS IN GOOD COMPANY film screening
The charming drama, about the relationships that develop when a tour bus of older women becomes stranded for several days in the isolated countryside, “One of the year’s 10 best films,” critic Hal Hinson writes in The Washington Post.
“A timeless piece of magic,” Robyn Karney writes in Empire film magazine.
“Feels less like a drama than a vacation,” Janet Maslin writes in The New York Times.
The film, also called “The Company of Strangers,” stars eight nonactors playing themselves in a fictitious setting. The director, award-winning filmmaker Cynthia Scott, asked the women to ad-lib their conversations and talk about their real lives, rather than follow a fixed script.
The women are from the United States, Canada and Britain. They don’t originally know each other but find themselves suddenly depending on each other when the bus they were in breaks down and they’re stranded in a largely uninhabited area of the rural Canadian countryside.
Finding refuge in an empty farmhouse, the women listen to birds, play cards, make drawings, enjoy the scenery and eventually form an indelible bond as they start talking and sharing lots of different life experiences and memories.
They also catch fish using pantyhose for nets.
The women, almost all in their 70s and 80s, range in background from a Mohawk matriarch (Alice Diabo) and a U.S. feminist writer and painter (Mary Meigs) to a nun with a working knowledge of mechanics (Sister Catherine Roche).
The only young woman of the group is the bus driver (Michelle Sweeney), who is also a jazz singer.
“A beautifully unique work, both in its topic and its docufiction execution . . . celebrating the lives of these eight women and the experience of being together without the influences of men — or the outside world,” critic Amelie Lasker writes in The Hot Pink Pen.
The 1990 independent film earned four film-festival awards, including the Grand Prize at Germany’s Mannheim–Heidelberg International Film Festival.
The movie runs 1 hour 41 minutes and is rated PG. Its trailer can be found on YouTube at tinyurl.com/StrangersCompany-MoviesWSpirit.
The screening will be followed by a facilitated discussion. Refreshments will be served.
Attendees over age 12 are asked to contribute $10 a person.
Movies With Spirit screenings comply with all federal, state and local health and safety protocols, including those of the screening venues.
The monthly Movies With Spirit series, organized by Gerry Harrington of Kingston, seeks to stimulate people’s sense of joy and wonder, inspire love and compassion, evoke a deepened understanding of people’s integral connection with others and with life itself, and support individual cultures, faith paths and beliefs while simultaneously transcending them.
