The Sweet Hereafter

In a snowbound British Columbia town, a school bus skids off the road and drowns most of the community's children in an icy lake. A lawyer arrives to organise a lawsuit, drawing the bereaved families into questions of blame while carrying the private wound of his own estranged, lost daughter.

The film sets a community's shared mourning against the impossibility of repair, showing how litigation, denial and memory become ways of managing what cannot be undone. Awarded the Grand Prix at Cannes in 1997, and adapted from the novel The Sweet Hereafter by Russell Banks.