In the Company of Strangers

Mary Meigs is one of the eight women who portray themselves in the film The Company of Strangers, a "semi-documentary" National film Board production, released in 1990 to overwhelming critical and popular acclaim. Meigs spent two years writing this extraordinary narrative, which begins as her story of being in the film and unfolds into a gentle, intricate meditation on the experience of time, old age, magic and binding. Time becomes still and circular as the women's self-images and film images, their past and present, are bound inextricably with the filmmaker's vision. Interwoven with Meigs' reflections on time, aging, and the phenomenon of film, are her portraits of each cast member on and off camera. The eight women are strangers who first become company, then friends.