Critics say that depicting a crash in a film glamourises traumatic road accidents, but many directors have pointed out that it's a real-life situation that needs to be documented and that if cinema-goers see how a car accident can occur on the big screen, it can often help to prevent a real car accident when they are on the road.

Psychologists have furthermore reported that car accident victims who watch a film relating to their crash may find it easier to process what has happened, to realise they are not alone in their experience, and to find ways to cope modelled on techniques displayed by the character suffering the same problems (grief or memory loss for example).

Memory loss and an inability to handle normal daily activities and career are often experienced by people who have suffered a vehicle accident. In 'Red Wood Pigeon', the central character loses his memory after a car crash but then tries to reconstruct his life, dreams and political motives.

A young boxer's professional career is disrupted by a car accident in the Japanese film 'Aiku', but his life changes for the better when he meets a temple assistant who introduces him to aiku-jujitsu. This martial art allows him to channel enough energy to turn away opponents with a flick of the wrist, and his career subsequently expands and transforms in a different way.

In 'Resurrection' a woman discovers that she has the power to heal after a car crash which kills her husband and gives her a serious personal injury that leaves her crippled. In her home town in Kansas, she accepts her gift but refuses to accept that she has been blessed with any special powers as the result of her crash.

Flashbacks of the accident are also common. In 'Cello', music teacher Mi-Ju is haunted by visions of a car accident that she narrowly survived. Strange occurrences are also often reported. This is reflected in 'Changing Lanes', when the lives of two men become intertwined following a car accident when one character's car is written off in a crash and another character gives him a blank cheque.

'Amores Perres' has a car accident at its centre which occurs at a busy Mexico City intersection and which also interlinks several different characters with separate realities. They include a hobo/hit man who roams the city with a pack of wild dogs (who witnesses the crash), an ambitious supermodel (who is hit in the crash) and a punk who makes money from dogfights (who is injured by the car).

The director Inarritu says of his representation of the car accident: "The first thing I wanted to explore is the accident itself. You see the consequences of the accident, you see what happens after it and before it, but I never actually show it. This means that people must construct it on their own; they can see it only in their minds. They imagine it.

"Secondly, I wanted to explore an accident as a metaphor of life. Life as an accident. Life is full of accidents. We have control of nothing. Somebody really is not writing things for us. Things just happen. It's all an accident. And only afterward do we make any sense of it..The mathematician is trying to do this. He is trying to make sense of the accident. Of life."

Losing family members is the most terrible result of a car accident that most people hope will never happen to them. Sometimes, however, it sadly does. In 'Ponette', a young grief-stricken girl tries to cope with the loss of her mother after a fatal car accident. 'Raise Your Voice' is an optimistic film about another young girl from a small town who loses her brother in a car crash, but finds strength to continue through music at a performing arts camp in Los Angeles.

Many famous directors and actors have also had their fair share of car accidents, and some of those experiences gave rise to their appearance in the scripts of films they either directed or appeared in. The most serious and tragic of them all ended in the death of superstar James Dean at the tender age of 26. Thankfully, however, most car accidents involving celebrities are not fatal.