The Sweet Hereafter (1997)

[First para. of encyclopaedia entry]: "Atom Egoyan’s adaptation of Russell Banks’ The Sweet Hereafter treats two tragedies: a bus crash in which all but one of a community’s school-age children plunge to their deaths in icy water, and incest. In North American cinema, films about trauma tend to make a spectacle of suffering through a focus on the immediacy of individual pain and loss. Egoyan’s understated film avoids spectacle and zooms out to look instead at how the representation of trauma shapes communities’ experiences of it over time. Focusing on the mediation of trauma (including its own), the film explores the unstable nature of truth and knowledge and the continuities and discontinuities of traumatic memory through a disorienting multi-perspective narrative structure that moves back and forth through over 20 different time frames. This structure juxtaposes different kinds of remembering and forgetting to lay bare their deeper ideological investments. As a whole, the film’s structure models a way of representing traumatic history that allows a plurality of voices to be heard, the inconsistencies in their perspectives to be acknowledged, and above all, a means of articulating deeper truths than those of history’s referential recordings through art’s modes of memorialising."