The Sweet Hereafter

In our latest Film Studies series, filmmaker and educator Patricia Gruben – founder of the Praxis Centre for Screenwriters – unpacks different approaches to writing for the screen, focusing here on adaptation from literary sources.

Atom Egoyan’s most admired film is based on Russell Banks’s novel of the same name, which in turn is based on the transcript of an inquest into a fatal school bus crash. Banks fictionalized the deadpan testimony of the original source into contradictory first-person accounts by survivors and witnesses to the accident. Egoyan refined this device and added an element of myth to deconstruct the narrative, leaving us wondering not which account is truest, but which will serve best to heal the wound in a community mourning the loss of a generation of its children.

Film studies tickets are $18 or buy the series pass for $80

This fusion of Banks’s and Egoyan’s sensibilities stands as a particularly inspired mix.

Janet Maslin, New York Times

Though this is Egoyan’s first adaptation, The Sweet Hereafter could serve as a model for how to do it right.

Kenneth Turan, LA Times

Patricia Gruben is a filmmaker and former associate professor of film at Simon Fraser University, as well as founder and long-time director of Praxis Centre for Screenwriters (now the Screenwriters Lab at the Whistler Film Festival.) Her films have been screened at TIFF, VIFF, Sundance and the New York Film Festival, and her writing on film has appeared in international academic and popular journals. Her new feature film Heart of Gold will be released in 2025.