Trains
- Thursday, Jul 9, 2026, 7:30pm
Screening location: SIFF Film Center – 167 Republican St, Seattle(located within the Seattle Center, just north of Climate Pledge Arena / east of KEXP and The Vera Project)
TRAINS is a deeply personal and contemplative journey through the twentieth century, composed entirely of archival film footage. In this wordless film, full of beauty and bitterness, the excitement of adventure becomes a curse, and tears of joy mingle with the pain of despair.
A train compartment is a place where, for a while, people are taken out of their everyday context. For a few hours or days, they inhabit a temporary community, and their lives unfold according to a timetable. A train journey is something beautiful, magical, but also often very dramatic. 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.
Co-presented with Mount Analogue Art + Cinema, TRAINS is a documentary crafted in the found footage genre, using archival film materials from 46 archives around the world. This film harnesses the vast potential of cinematic language to forge an emotional connection between the viewer and the archival reality.
“Trains is not just a technical achievement – a skillful and patient result of working with archives – but also a meditation on the moral weight and responsibility of images.” Ola Salwa, Cineuropa
“Like Koyaanisqatsi with an Interrail pass… this magnetic cine-essay is also a hidden tribute to that second voyager in space and time: the train’s contemporary, the movie camera.” Phil Hoad, The Guardian