FEATURING Q&A WITH PRODUCER

TRAINS is a found-footage documentary composed entirely of archive footage and sound design that creates a collective portrait of people in 20th century Europe, capturing their hopes, desires, dramas and tragedies. A train compartment is a place where people are taken out of their everyday context for a while. Sometimes the journey is accompanied by the hope that something will change in our lives upon reaching the destination, or conversely, by a stark absence of hope. And yet the history of the 20th century unfolds in railway carriages in a repetitive refrain.

Every few years, hauntingly similar scenes play out in railway stations around the world: carriages full of men leaving for war, only to return wounded or as casualties. This cycle is followed by an exodus of civilians, evacuees mingling with prisoners of war returning from camps, and soldiers of victorious armies leading the defeated, until ordinary passengers reappear at stations.

The film's chronological rigor imparts an "on-rails" historical linearity, a sensation of inexorable progress and doom. -William Repass, Slant Magazine

The advent of the steam age ushered in a great social revolution, but as Maciej Drygas’s film points out, the technology also took us off the rails. Phil Hoad, The Guardian