Planes, Trains, Automobiles

A freight train crosses the landscape like a giant steel snake ripping through the silence. One day, three women left everything behind to defy danger and cross the country on board freight trains. They wait for them, hiding in the bushes, sleeping under highway bridges. In this beautiful documentary, the director becomes these women’s traveling companion. Their trajectories cross and echo each other: a desire to live, a spiritual quest, eternal rebellion.

Deep inside a pristine forest, we hear the sudden sound of a chainsaw felling a fir tree. So begins this breathtakingly photographed, puzzle-like documentary which follows the mysterious journey of the tree’s lumber entirely through thirteen 360° panning shots; a wide-angle picture of the role nature plays in a world defined by globalization.

Filmed over the course of five years, The Area is a panoramic documentary about a neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago, home to more than 400 African-American families, that is being displaced by the Norfolk Southern railroad company. It is a complex story of economic revitalization, commercial interests, and community rights.

One day, Lucie decides to write a letter to the man who abused her when she was a young girl. She then takes her camera, her car, and resolves to bring it to him in person. This award-winning short doc was started by Lucie, but finished by her son, Loic, when he discovered the video tape of her journey ten years later.

The first railway line in Thailand was inaugurated in 1893 – a sign of progress and prosperity. Shot over eight years on every active line of the railway system, this extraordinary documentary, produced by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, offers an unprecedented immersion into the country’s past and present.

What impact does sound have on our lives? From classical music to a hummingbird flapping its wings to the Earth’s natural hum, this is a fantastic exploration of the psychology, sociology and economics of sound.

Using found snapshots, diary entries and 16mm Chinese melodramas, filmmaker Jason Byrne resurrects the ghosts of a decommissioned cargo ship - once used to carry coal along the Yangtze - as it crosses the Indian Ocean to be salvaged for scrap.

This intimate, moving documentary follows young Lakota riders on a 300-mile trek on horseback through the South Dakota badlands, as they retrace the fateful journey of their ancestors that culminated at Wounded Knee.

Beginning with Ozu's 1936 The Only Son, Thom Andersen's latest cinematic treat, a documentary short, is an anthology of train arrivals, comprising 26 scenes from movies, 1904-2015.

An enormous shipping freighter drifts endlessly across the Atlantic Ocean; its' crew toiling tirelessly below. At times resembling a dystopian science-fiction film, this is trenchant commentary on global trade, labor and capitalism.

In this wondrous documentary, celebrated filmmaker Jose Luis Guerin peers inside an 18th century painting hidden away in a French cathedral to vividly recount a little-known, but pivotal slave revolt on the high seas.