The Sweet Hereafter

A lawyer, pursued by the demons of losing a daughter to drugs, comes to a Canadian town where 20 children have died in a school bus accident. He wants the parents to sue, to determine who was at fault, and to focus their anger on making those at fault pay. Told partly in flashbacks to the days leading up to the accident, we also follow the attorney from family to family, coaxing them to join the suit. One young teen survives, crippled. She has become the lame child left behind in "The Pied Piper of Hamlin," which she reads aloud to a child the night before the accident. Her testimony is pivotal, and her relationship with her own father leads to what she says.