Documentary, 80′

Directed by: Maciej J. Drygas
Production: Poland, Lithuania, 2024

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.

Directed and written by: Maciej J. Drygas
Editing: Rafał Listopad
Music: the film’s soundtrack includes excerpts from Pawel Szymanski’s composition „Compartment 2, car 7”.

Production management: Rafał Czapliński, Antoni Sambor, Hanna Twardowska-Machnio
Producers: Vita Zelakeviciute
Production company: Drygas Film Production
Co-production companies: Era Film, TVP S.A., FIXA FILM

Co-financed by: Polish Film Institute, Lietuvos Kino Centras

International promotion & Festival distribution: IKH Pictures Promotion

Maciej J. Drygas is a renowned film and radio director, screenwriter, producer, and profesor at the Polish National Film School in Łódź. His works have received numerous prestigious awards, including the European Film Academy Award for Best Documentary for Hear My Cry (1991), the Prix Italia for the radio documentary Last Will (1992), the Grand Prix at the Monte Carlo International Television Festival for State of Weightlessness (1995), and the award for Best Feature-Length Documentary at the Cinema Verité festival in Tehran for Abu Haraz (2013). Drygas also wrote the libretto for the opera Qudsja Zaher, which was nominated for the International Opera Awards in London in 2014. He is the originator and founder of the Home Movie Archive at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Warsaw. His films and radio documentaries have been broadcast across Europe, as well as in Canada, Japan, Brazil, South Africa, New Caledonia, and Australia.