The Sweet Hereafter is a 1997 Canadian film written and directed by Atom Egoyan. It is adaptation of the novel of the same name by Russell Banks.

The Sweet Hereafter depicts life in a small town in Canada in the wake of a terrible school bus accident in which numerous local children are killed. Hardly able to cope with the loss, their grieving parents are approached by a slick city lawyer who wants them to sue for damages. At first the parents are reluctant to do so, but eventually they are persuaded by the lawyer that filing a class action lawsuit would ease their minds and also be the right thing to do.

As most of the children are dead, the case now depends on the few surviving witnesses to say the right things in court. In particular, it is 15 year-old Nichole Burnell, who was sitting at the front of the bus and is now paralysed from the waist down, whose deposition is all-important. However, she unexpectedly accuses Dolores Driscoll, the driver, of speeding and thus causing the accident. When she does so, all hopes of ever receiving money are thwarted. All the people involved know that Nichole is lying but cannot do anything about it. Only her father knows why, but he is unable to publicly reveal his daughter's motives, because the truth is that he has had an incestuous relationship with his daughter.

Russell Banks approved Egoyan's the adaptation, playing a cameo role as the town doctor, and discussing the film with Egoyan in the DVD's commentary track.

In adapting the novel, Egoyan changed the setting from Upstate New York to Canada. Another major change is Egoyan's addition of references to the story of The Pied Piper of Hamelin by Robert Browning, which Nichole is seen reading to children who later die in the accident. In that story, the Pied Piper leads all the children away, never to return, after their parents refuse to honor their debt to him.

In the Pied Piper, there is a crippled child who is unable to follow the Piper's song, and so he is left behind in a now-childless town, forever wishing he could have gone with the other children. The paralyzed survivor, Nichole, is clearly identified with this child in the movie, shifting away from her motivation in the book in which she is primarily acting out of anger against her incestuous father. Instead in the movie she has mixed feeling about the accident - on the one hand it has crippled her and killed her friends, on the other hand it has given her power over her father.

The movie was filmed in four locations: Merritt, British Columbia, Spences Bridge, British Columbia, Stouffville, Ontario, and Toronto, Ontario.

The Pied Piper theme is further enhanced through Mychael Danna's score, which is heavily influenced by Medieval and Renaissance music with frequent appearances of a flute.

The song Courage (for Hugh MacLennan) by The Tragically Hip serves as the theme song used in the soundtrack. A version of the song as sung by Sarah Polley also appears in the film.

The Sweet Hereafter won three awards at the Cannes Film Festival: the FIPRESCI Prize, the Grand Prize of the Jury, and the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury. It won Best Motion Picture at the Genie Awards for Canadian Films. It was also nominated for Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay at the Academy Awards.