Here’s your chance to talk to the source about The Sweet Hereafter.
Internationally-acclaimed Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan, left, (Ararat, The Adjuster, Exotica) will present the award-winning 1997 drama, The Sweet Hereafter, at 6pm, Wednesday, Feb. 26, at Curtis Lecture Hall ''L''. The event is free.
The film (promotional poster, lower right) details the devastating aftermath of a school bus accident in rural British Columbia that takes the lives of 14 children and brings to town a city lawyer bent on mounting a class-action lawsuit on behalf of the victims and their families. The screening is part of "The Indepdendents", the same series of film screenings and discussions that recently brought us Le Neg, and is sponsored by the Graduate Program in Film & Video.
Following the film-screening, author Ian Balfour, director of York University''s Graduate Program in English, will lead a discussion about the film. Balfour is the author of The Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy and various essays on popular culture and aesthetic theory. Currently he is editing The Paul de Man Reader, a volume of the South Atlantic Quarterly on human rights, and is co-editing, with Atom Egoyan, Subtitles: On the Foreignness of Film.
Egoyan was president of the jury at the 2003 Berlin International Film Festival. He is currently working on a production of Wagner''s Ring Cycle for the Canadian Opera Company.