Saturday, November 8, 2025 at 3:00 PM
Tribeca Screening Room
375 Greenwich St #2, New York, NY 10013

Free event, please RSVP
The screening will be followed by a Q&A with Maciej J. Drygas and Bill Morrison

Masterfully edited… Harnesses the magic of cinema and as an audience we are haunted by our present historical time, even while we bear witness to the past… The film confronts us with history both subtly and with exacting precision and without a single word of dialogue. – International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) Jury

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. – Cineuropa

Join us for a screening of Trains and a discussion on archival documentary filmmaking with director Maciej J. Drygas and Bill Morrison, the Academy Award–nominated experimental filmmaker.

Trains is a powerful cinematic journey crafted entirely from archival railway footage gathered from around the world. In this remarkable film, Maciej Drygas weaves together images of motion, industry, and humanity to capture the hopes, desires, and passage of time that defined the 20th century.

The internationally acclaimed documentary has recently been released in U.S. cinemas as part of a broader promotional campaign accompanying its submission for consideration in the Academy Awards’ Best Documentary Feature category.

Director Maciej J. Drygas is a renowned film and radio director, screenwriter, producer, and professor 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.

Producer Vita Zelakeviciute is President of the Management Board at Drygas Film Production since 2017. Producer of notable films including Danger Zone (2023, dir. Vita Maria Dygas) and Trains (2024, dir. Maciej Drygas). With a background in directing award-winning documentaries, Želakevičiūtė brings a strong creative vision to her production work. She is also a long-time expert for the Polish Film Institute and a lecturer at the Wajda School in Warsaw.

Title: Trains (Pociągi)
Director: Maciej J. Drygas
Country: Poland
Year: 2024
Runtime: 81 min
Format: Archival footage / DCP

The event is co-presented by the Polish Cultural Institute New York.