Okay I saw another contender for saddest movie ever alongside The Sweet Hereafter and Bridge to Terabithia. It's 2001 movie titled Things Behind the Sun* and stars Kim Dickens as a messed up musician who was raped as an adolescent. It's not that these movies are tearjerkers. They're sad to an extent that they're existentially horrifying.** I've always liked Dickens who was in Deadwood among other good things.*** She's 47 and according to IMDB she "made her stage debut in a student production of David Mamet's "Sexual Perversity in Chicago" at Vanderbilt University." So maybe she graduated the year before I arrived from Chicago. I visited a friend's brother the year before attending so maybe we were at the same bar or party. Yeah probably not.

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* The title is taken from a Nick Drake song (see above). In 1999, "Pink Moon" was used in "Milky Way", a Volkswagen Cabrio commercial, leading to a large increase in his record sales. The song plays at the end of the movie or over the credits, I forget which, maybe both. The film was directed and written by Allison Anders. When writing fiction in high school and or at college (in a fiction class with New Republic writer Michelle Cottle) I'd often use pop songs as spring boards for my fiction as Anders does here. Supposedly the movie is semi-autobiographical.
** As in Edvard Munch's The Scream. One of the things that makes these movie the best sad films, is that their young characters have a redeeming humanity and resilience in the face of tragedy (Although what doesn't kill you doesn't necessarily make you stronger. It can fuck you up royally basically ending your chances at a "normal" life.)
*** I haven't watched Treme but will check it out now. A new seasons starts this fall. (Adolph Reed Jr. doesn't like the show, comparing it unfavorably with The Wire.)