Winner of the Grand Prize, the International Critics Prize and the Ecumenical Prize at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival, Atom Egoyan's THE SWEET HEREAFTER is about the human journey towards acceptance and grace, and the interwoven paths of innocence and evil, light and dark, that lead us there. A timely film that explores the nature of loss and healing, The Sweet Hereafter marks a watershed point in Egoyan's career and confirms him as a world-class filmmaker.

Adapted from the acclaimed novel by Russell Banks, The Sweet Hereafter fuses a literary sense of detail and scope with richly cinematic storytelling. Like such previous Egoyan films as Exotica, The Adjuster and Speaking Parts, The Sweet Hereafter is meticulously constructed, moving gracefully between time periods and making subtle use of metaphor to reveal the complex truths of its characters' lives. Ultimately, in confronting some of life's most difficult questions -- what do you do, and how do you cope in the face of a cataclysm that defies explanation or blame? -- The Sweet Hereafter becomes a healing experience itself.

Director Atom Egoyan was given Russell Banks' novel The Sweet Hereafter by his wife and frequent collaborator ArsinŽe Khanjian. "I'd never read any of Russell's books before. It was a revelation," Egoyan says. "There's this beautiful balance between the mundane and the ordinary on the one hand, and the most extreme situations people can find themselves in on the other. The book catapults us into a simple world that has to deal with fundamental moral issues."

Those issues arise in the wake of an accident in the small rural community of Sam Dent, British Columbia. A school bus inexplicably crashes into a frozen lake, killing fourteen children and injuring many others. Soon after, Mitchell Stephens (Ian Holm), a lawyer who is himself bedeviled by his daughter's (Caerthan Banks) hopeless drug addiction, arrives in the geographically isolated town, promising the townspeople compensation and retribution for their loss if they will let him represent them in a class-action suit.

Notes Egoyan, "It's like an image from a western -- the big sky, the deserted street. The stranger who comes to town. My films have always been about people who are outside of communities, so the challenge I had was to inhabit how these people lived and to reveal the details of their lives."

The details of those lives -- the shadowy secrets, the hidden dalliances -- are mysteries brought to light in The Sweet Hereafter. Stephens first visits Wendell and Risa Walker (Maury Chaykin and Alberta Watson), who run the local motel and whose son was killed in the accident.

The Walkers, who do not present the most harmonious scene from a marriage, direct Stephens to others affected by the event: Dolores Driscoll (Gabrielle Rose), the bus driver; Wanda and Hartley Otto (ArsinŽe Khanjian and Earl Pastko), who lost their adopted son; widower Billy Ansell (Bruce Greenwood), who lost his son and daughter; and the Burnell family, Sam and Mary (Tom McCamus and Brooke Johnson), and their teenage daughter Nicole (Sarah Polley), a talented musician left permanently crippled by the accident. Nicole, as the prime witness, is the key to Stephens building his case.

But Nicole is also the key to reuniting the town, whose cohesion is being destroyed as its secrets threaten to emerge. In one act of tremendous wisdom and bravery, Nicole halts the process of disintegration and regains her dignity. Through her courage, the townspeople come to dwell in "the sweet hereafter," a realm reserved for those who are at peace with their fate.

The idea of a special place, a "sweet hereafter," is echoed in the film's central metaphor, Robert Browning's poem "The Pied Piper of Hamelin," which Egoyan added to the story. For Egoyan, the poem evokes "this idea of being led somewhere magical... a place which can on the one hand annihilate, but also elevate and bring cohesion and purpose."

Author Banks applauds the addition of the Browning poem, "I really wish I'd had that idea." He is equally impressed by the other alterations Egoyan made in adapting the novel, which was narrated by four different characters. "The structural changes Atom made are really fascinating to me, because I never would have imagined that the book could be translated into a film. The amazing part to me is that he's kept the same thematic concerns that the novel has, and in many, many ways, the same tone and texture of the story."

Banks feels a creative kinship with Egoyan, who is known for his rigorous craftsmanship. "He takes the ordinary texture of life and mythologizes it and turns it into a larger, more universal story through a very controlled means of balance and symmetry and opposition, which is very much how I work as well. Also, we share a lot of the same obsessive concerns, like an interest in family structures. Atom is like an archeologist, digging away at the layers of family in order to get its true history told."

Banks' novel was inspired by a series of newspaper accounts written in the late 1980s about the aftermath of a real-life school bus accident in South Texas. He kept the articles and began speculating on the aftermath of the accident and its effect on the community. Through the process of imagining his novel, the subject took on a larger poetic and symbolic significance.

"It's a parable in a way," he says, "though the texture and the surface of it is realistic and kind of gritty. It's really a parable of the lost children, something that I think is a widespread cultural phenomenon in the last half of our century, where in some terrible way, our culture has lost its children."

Helping connect this story of a small town to the larger world is the film's majestic cinematography. By shooting the film in anamorphic cinemascope, notes director of photography Paul Sarossy, "it opens up a whole new dimension compositionally. It's just sort of instantly beautiful to look at, no matter how mundane the subject that the camera is pointed at." Another advantage to the wide-screen format is that it allows the possibility of close-ups while other things occur within the same frame. "Atom wanted to find the landscape in the character's faces," Sarossy explains, "and the format is quite ideal for that. The terrain of the face fits in the context of the greater geography."

The format also allows for the filming of a character and his or her background at the same time. Thus, the bus driver Dolores Driscoll's personal pain is all the more palpable as we see her surrounded by photos of the children she drove, "her kids."