Atom Egoyan pieces together the shards of a tragedy that has left a community shattered in this ethereal, emotionally arresting film, an Oscar-nominated adaptation of the Russell Banks novel. Drifting between past and present, The Sweet Hereafter offers an intimate panorama of a snowbound Canadian town reckoning with the fallout of a school-bus crash that claimed the lives of fourteen children—a fresh wound that’s further inflamed when a big-city lawyer, who is contending with his own personal tragedy, arrives to assemble a lawsuit on behalf of the victims’ families. Achieving an almost incantatory intensity through the mesmerizing performances of an ensemble cast led by Ian Holm and Sarah Polley, this winner of the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival is a devastatingly clear-eyed vision of the ways in which trauma can ripple through our lives.
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Supplements
- Audio commentary from 1998 featuring Atom Egoyan and author Russell Banks
- Audio commentary from 2012 featuring Atom Egoyan
- New interview with Atom Egoyan
- Interview with Atom Egoyan and actor Sarah Polley
- “Egoyan to the Oscars,” a 1998 segment from the Canadian television program The National
- Episode of the Criterion Channel series Observations on Film Art about the use of associative editing, featuring scholar Jeff Smith
- Isolated track featuring Mychael Danna's score
- Trailers
- An essay by critic César Albarrán-Torres and an introduction by Atom Egoyan