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TRAINS

POLISH TITLE: POCIĄGI

Trains opens with a quote from Franz Kafka: “There is plenty of hope. An infinite amount of hope. But not for us.” These words hang like a dark cloud over this found footage documentary, which creates a collective portrait of people in 20th century Europe, capturing their hopes, desires, dramas, and tragedies.

Powerful scenes showing steam locomotives and railroad cars being assembled feel like a celebration of human ingenuity and labor. People dressed in festive attire embark on a rail journey. But these cheerful scenes soon make way for military transport: soldiers being deployed to the frontlines—quickly followed by civilians evacuating, a procession of ragged prisoners-of-war, and amputee soldiers.

Times change, the pattern repeats. The archival material in this wordless film evokes an inevitable cycle of delight and destruction, beauty and bitterness. The image of a tangle of railroad tracks and switches raises the inevitable question: Which route will humanity choose?

TRAILER
GENRE:
documentary
RUNNING TIME:
80'
YEAR:
COLOUR:
black and white
DIRECTING:
Maciej Drygas
SCRIPT:
Maciej Drygas
EDITOR:
Rafał Listopad
MUSIC:
Paweł Szymański
PRODUCTION:
Drygas Production

Maciej Drygas »

scriptwriter and documentary film director born in 1956 in Łódź. After graduation from the Film Directing Department at Moscow’s VGIK in 1981 he worked with Krzysztof Zanussi and Krzysztof Kieślowski as a director’s assistant. His documentaries include False Start (1981), Psychotherapy (1984), Hear My Cry (1991), State of Weightlessness (1994), Głos nadziei (2002), One Day in People’s Poland (2005). He has won a number of festival awards in, among others, Mumbai, Huston, Tai Pei, Monte Carlo, San Francisco, Nyon and Kraków. Currently he teaches at the Film School in Łódź.