Winner of both the Best Film and Best Editing awards (the latter awarded to Rafał Listopad) at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), Trains by veteran Polish documentarian Maciej J. Drygas is a deep exploration of the past and the “positive and negative consequences of modern industrial innovation,” using rail transport as its central perspective.
Conceived in the filmmaker’s mind in 2014 from an initial note scribbled on a page stating that “trains serve as a metaphor for life,” Trains is constructed entirely from archival footage, marking Drygas’s third foray into the realm of found footage, following One Day in People’s Poland, which explored an ordinary day (27 September 1962) in communist Poland, and Violated Letters, based on private correspondence illegally intercepted and read by Polish security services between 1945 and 1989.
Both a historical account of the serial construction of locomotives and an exploration of what train travel symbolised across 20th-century Europe, Trains meticulously situates each of its scenes in time, yet abstractly achieves a timeless quality—particularly in its reflection on humanity’s recurring impulse to invent something technologically brilliant for the sake of “good,” only to later weaponise it for war.
Presented entirely in black and white, with a meticulously engineered soundscape that heightens the viewer’s perception of the film’s shifting eras, the film opens with scenes of the careful construction of steam locomotives, as railway stations fill with smiling passengers embarking on journeys that gloriously brought cities and people closer together. Yet, as history reminds us, those smiles were swiftly replaced by the dread of two world wars, during which rail networks were used primarily to transport soldiers, prisoners of war, refugees, the wounded, and weapons—spreading conflict across continents faster than by sea or road.
If we pause to consider, the train passenger primarily experiences the landscape from a lateral viewpoint. That window becomes a living frame for a continuous flow of moving images—strikingly akin to the very essence of cinema. In this way, it becomes impossible, in a sense, to disentangle that window from the invention of cinema itself, which would emerge little more than eighty years after Richard Trevithick set the first steam-powered locomotive in motion in 1804.
Curiously, or perhaps inevitably, one of the earliest films in history was The Arrival of a Train, establishing an eternal connection between cinema and rail travel—a link the director underscores by placing the iconic Charlie Chaplin, in his Tramp persona, stepping out of a train carriage.
It is through the images of this invention called cinema—around 600 scenes sourced from 46 of the 90 archives consulted worldwide—that Maciej J. Drygas and his longtime editor transcend mere historical observation to create an object of human reflection, where technology, politics, and society intersect—through beauty, joy, and hope, as much as through pain, grief, and death. And the quotation from Kafka that opens the film captures this duality perfectly, foreshadowing what lies ahead: “There is infinite hope in the universe… But not for us.”