Kinoteka Polish Film Festival 2026: Trains

Director: Maciej J. Drygas

Trains by Polish director Maciej J. Drygas is a mesmerising piece of story telling. Using only black and white archival footage of trains, trainworkers and passengers, it traces the momentous social and historical changes of the first half of the twentieth century.

The fact that there is no voice-over, just Saulius Urbanavičius’s haunting sound design, intensifies the experience. We may repeatedly wonder whether a particular wartime clip shows people from an Allied country or that of an enemy one. But that’s the point. In its rhythm of repeated experiences – men, women and children lugging suitcase, waving from trains, watching from carriage windows – Trains reminds us of our shared humanity.

At first, with no guiding narrative to shape our expectations, we may watch marvellous early footage of  steam engines under construction in a sunlit shed with a sense of wonder. Men work methodically and silently, alone or in teams. There are no health and safety regulations – no hard hats, no steel-capped boots or goggles. A man in ordinary clothes hammers something inside drum of a vast engine while his  workmates crouch beneath its wheels. In further scenes – here or elsewhere – Rafał Listopad’s editing is miraculously seamless – we realise we’ve been watching the birth of the passenger train, as carriages are clipped into place and the whole assemblage moves off into the light.

From here on in, there’s a wealth of glorious footage. Edwardian ladies in voluminous hats are followed by stylish flappers, all eagerly awaiting the train that is just pulling in. ‘Cheap Trips on Sundays’ announces a poster from a London railway terminus.

But all too soon the ominous undertones of the soundtrack point to another unstoppable change. Now lines of troops march steadily down the hill to Knotty Ash station, while their equivalent numbers board trains in various European capitals. Yet wherever they are, the soldiers wave cheerfully from carriage windows. ‘Never such innocence/ Never before or since,’ as Philip Larkin wrote in ‘August MCMXIV’.

From here it’s a steady descent into first one, than another world war. Women are seen working, making shells in munitions factory. A massive cannon is rolled out into a desolate, cratered landscape.  We are shown one of those heart-breaking lines of blindfolded men, plodding slowly out of the trenches, one hand resting on the shoulder of the man in front. There is a makeshift operating theatre. Here is an injured man, twitching uncontrollably. Someone is being fitted for a mask to cover severe facial injuries.

Then there are the light-hearted moments. One man in a Parisian crowd has noticed the camera, and keeps trying to get in shot. On board a first class train, passengers are offered silver service. There’s a carriage converted into a ballroom. Imaginative director, Maciej J. Drygas, even managed to locate the film first-class passengers are watching in the train’s cinema – Charlie Chaplin, appropriately, emerging from beneath a train.

In a horrifying moment, we realise we are watching Hitler. He’s being filmed from behind as he leans out of a train window to greet his admirers. And all too soon there is poignant footage of streams of lost-looking families on the streets of a city – Vienna, perhaps? – all wearing the star of David.

Later civilians hurry towards a wagon train, the camera catching the almost-eager faces of women lifting up their arms to be helped aboard. Each wagon is locked. ’74 pers’ is scrawled on the side of one. The footage from the end of the war when Allied troops unlock other wagons is almost unbearable to watch. We briefly glimpse a heap of emaciated corpses in their distinctive stripped prison garb.

More archival footage shows a train trundling past a devasted city – it must surely be Dresden. Then there are all those displaced people clutching bundles. The footage here and indeed throughout the film is pin sharp – all those close ups of faces whose stories will never be told.

Drygas’s prize-winning film is prefaced with words from Kafka:

There is plenty of hope

An infinite amount of hope …

But not for us.

But finally there is some joy, as families greet returned loved ones, and in an evocative image, thousands of pigeons are released from crates to fly free.

Trains screens at Kinoteka Polish Film Festival on 18 March.