The Sweet Hereafter is a 1997 Canadian drama film written and directed by Atom Egoyan, adapted from the 1991 novel by Russell Banks. It tells the story of a school bus accident in a small town that kills 14 children. A class-action lawsuit ensues, proving divisive in the community and becoming tied with personal and family issues.

Summary: The Sweet Hereafter is a film about trauma. After a fatal bus crash that kills almost all of a town’s children, a lawyer tries to rouse some of the victims’ families to pursue a class action suit.

In The Sweet Hereafter, as in his previous novels The Book of Jamaica (1980) and Affliction (1989), Banks uses multiple points of view, telling his story of a school-bus accident in a small New York town in the Adirondack mountains in which fourteen children are killed by using four different characters: Dolores Driscoll, the straightforward and practical school bus driver who is made an outcast in the town because of the...

A small community is torn apart by a tragic accident which kills most of the town's children. A lawyer visits the victims' parents in order to profit from the tragedy by stirring up their anger and launching a class action suit against anyone they can blame. The community is paralyzed by its anger and cannot let go.