Producers: Camelia Frieberg, Atom Egoyan  

Lest we as Canadians suspect that Atom Egoyan is so celebrated in Canada primarily because he is Canadian...  

"When the moment arrived to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Cannes Film Festival, a startling array of directors gathered on the stage of the Grand Salle Lumiere. Antonioni and Coppola, Wenders and Imamura, Lynch, Soderbergh, Campion and Leigh - it was a living testament to the cinema of the last three decades. Yet a question hung in the air: what about the next decades? Would there be fimmakers visionary enough to fill the shoes of an Antonioni or a Coppola? Was this, in effect, a celebration or an elegy?  

The answer came several days later, at the premiere of Atom Egoyan's spellbinding The Sweet Hereafter. Imagine the following: a school-bus accident in the Canadian wilderness - a wintry cataclysm that kills 14 children. A tormented attorney (Ian Holm) who tries to heal the community, and himself, by seeking a culprit. And then, something darker, a father who gently shatters the ultimate taboo. 

The link between innocence and evil is the theme of The Sweet Hereafter, a hypnotically structured, meditative mystery that instantly moves Egoyan to the front rank of world filmmakers. Anyone who saw Exotica, his kaleidoscopic puzzle movie about strip clubs, Lolita fantasies and murder, will recognize the intricate gamesmanship, the themes of forbidden sexuality and loss. But that movie had a poker-faced chill; this one is saturated in emotion... 

Adapting Russell Bank's novel, Egoyan creates a metaphysical soap opera whose most haunting - and sure to be controversial - element is its vision of incest, which Egoyan dares to portray as an extension, however twisted, of real paternal love. Its connection to the bus accident? That's the elusive mystery. In The Sweet Hereafter, there's a disturbance in the universe, a crack the movie seems almost desperate to heal." 

Owen Gleiberman 
Entertainment Weekly  

Selected Filmography: Next of Kin (84), Family Viewing (87), Speaking Parts (89), The Adjuster (91), Calender (93), Exotica (95)