Between Strangers

Three women in Toronto confront emotional crises regarding the men in their lives. Olivia looks after her husband John, a wheelchair user. Olivia has aspired to a career as an artist, but John believes she is wasting her time. Olivia finds encouragement from an unlikely source, Max, an eccentric French gardener. Olivia also harbors a secret about a daughter she gave up for adoption back in Italy; her anxieties about this secret are manifest in her drawings.

Natalia is a news photographer who, on assignment in Angola, took a portrait of a crying child orphaned by war. Her father Alexander, also a well-known photojournalist, is proud of Natalia when her photo appears on the cover of a news magazine, but she is haunted by the fact that while she made the child famous, she couldn't save her life.

Catherine is a world-famous cello player from New York who has come to Toronto to record an album. She has never been able to resolve her relationship with her father, Alan, who beat her mother to death when she was a child. When Alan is released from prison, she's willing to abandon her husband, children and career as a musician to track him down and kill him, unable to accept that he's a changed man.

Between Strangers was filmed in the summer of 2001 at Edwards Gardens and the R.C. Harris Water Treatment Plant in Toronto.^[2]