“TRAINS” TRIUMPH IN ROME
The documentary directed by Maciej Drygas has claimed the top prize at Italy's UnArchiveFest.
UnArchiveFest is an international film festival held in Rome, dedicated to the creative utilisation of archival materials and the discovery of unknown or forgotten narratives. It focuses on documentary films, experimental works and film essays that reinterpret history through editing and examining the past with a fresh perspective. The festival champions socially and politically engaged cinema, encouraging critical dialogue about memory, identity, and community. UnArchiveFest is organised by the AAMOD Association (Audiovisual Archive of the Workers' Movement) in Italy.
Best Use of Archive Footage, or the main award, went to Maciej Drygas. Trains opens with a quote from Franz Kafka: “There is hope, infinite hope – just not for us.” These words hover 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 the assembly of steam locomotives and railway carriages appear to celebrate human ingenuity and labour. People dressed in their finest clothes embark on railway journeys. But these joyful images soon give way to military transport: soldiers being deployed to the front line – quickly followed by civilian evacuations, processions of ragged prisoners of war and amputee soldiers. Times change, but the pattern keeps repeating. The archival footage in this silent film evokes an inevitable sense of a cycle of joy and destruction, beauty and bitterness. The image of tangled railway tracks and switches raises the question: which route is humanity going to choose?
More information about the festival can be found here.