At the dawn of the twentieth century, railways promise movement, connection and a new mastery of distance. Steam engines are assembled, stations fill with travellers and elegant carriages turn the journey itself into an event. In Maciej J. Drygas’s wordless archival film, these images of wonder soon acquire a darker rhythm.
The same tracks carry soldiers to the front, civilians into exile, prisoners towards camps and the wounded home again. War gives way to ordinary travel, only for the pattern to repeat. Across decades and borders, faces at carriage windows hold anticipation, boredom, fear and grief, while the train remains indifferent to where it is taking them.
Drygas spent ten years researching almost one hundred archives, shaping nearly 600 black-and-white images from 46 collections into a single cinematic movement. Editor Rafał Listopad and sound designer Saulius Urbanavičius give the silent footage a physical pulse: steel groans, wheels gather speed and the machinery seems to breathe.
Winner of Best Film and Best Editing at IDFA, Trains is both a collective portrait of twentieth-century Europe and an unsettling meditation on progress. Beauty and catastrophe travel side by side, leaving us to ask whether history is moving forward—or circling the same tracks.
In collaboration with WeDo Festival of Polish Contemporary Arts & Culture
