Produced by Zofia Kujawska and Maciej Kubicki of Polish production company Telemark, Zofia Sawicka’s debut feature observes the lives of folk on a train as it progresses through an empty wilderness.
“This film odyssey is a journey beyond time and space — days and seasons change, and an infinite steppe stretches outside the window,” reads the synopsis (in part). “In the cramped train interior, travellers from around the world meet. In this modern Tower of Babel, nationalities, languages, and religions intermingle.”
Director Sawicka summed it up even more succinctly in Krakow. “Somewhere on the planet Earth, there is a train, and its interior is our only setting,” she said.
Long train travel can be a mind-altering event, Sawicka further suggested, “especially when they’re far from home and from everyday life, sometimes for many days.”
“Finally, they have time to open up, to reflect, to confront – and thanks to this unique atmosphere inside the train, we have this possibility to be really close to them and to observe these intimate stories between our characters.” Such as the scene Industry attendees were shown in which a married couple assess their relationship – their marriage – to determine whether it was a union worth fighting for.
“It’s a mosaic story. We have a few main characters and others will appear only once,” added Sawicka. “We are shooting many journeys [but] create the impression of one big journey. We create this impression of a whole world in micro-space and time.”
Why is she choosing this story to tell? “I was just terrified of what’s going on in the world. It was the reason why I decided to go inside the train and travel for around seven months already. I was living inside, listening to stories, observing people. Right now I’m aware that I was looking for hope in a way of thinking about people – and I found it,” she confides.
“So even if our story leads us deeper and deeper into human emotions, and sometimes we are showing what I am struggling with – and it is darkness – we are going into light, because it’s most important for us in the final part of the movie to show our ability to love, to dream, to fight for our beliefs and dignity,” she adds.
“For me, personally, this project is a love poem about power and the beauty of being a human, and this magical feeling of connections and encounters inside the train.”
A final shooting session is planned for Kazakhstan this summer. All the time the film is being edited, and producer Maciej Kubicki is confident of delivering a “strong” rough cut in Spring 2026 in advance of the film’s completion by the end of the year. Before all of that, Kubicki wants to secure the final third of the film’s budget.
“I personally believe that, let’s call it ‘new’ storytelling with new voices, is really really relevant today,” Kubicki signed off, with a nod to his debutant director Sawicka.
