The Company of Strangers

Cynthia Scott's 1990 Canadian film is about eight older women stranded at an isolated country house when their bus breaks down. While waiting for help they look for food, try to keep warm and pass the time, and as they do, they talk. What sets the film apart is that the performers are not professionals: the women, the youngest of them sixty-nine, worked from a largely improvised text drawn from their own lives. The stories they tell are real: war, migration, loss, sexuality, faith and ageing itself. It came out of a method developed at the National Film Board of Canada that sits between fiction and documentary. It became the highest-grossing production in the board's history and was distributed internationally under a different title. Who it's for: viewers who like quiet films about old age and women's experience. Who it's not for: anyone looking for plot and tension; the film is almost entirely conversation.