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EPF Media

Maciej Drygas: Archaeologist of Memory

by

Essays

For more than three decades, Polish filmmaker Maciej J. Drygas has been excavating the past. Working patiently through forgotten documents, censored correspondence, and neglected film reels, he has built one of the most distinctive bodies of work in documentary cinema. His films are not simply historical investigations. They are acts of recovery—bringing lost voices, hidden stories, and buried emotions back into public consciousness.

Now, with Trains (2024), Drygas has created what may be the culmination of that lifelong artistic pursuit: a wordless symphony that transforms hundreds of fragments of twentieth-century history into a profound meditation on memory, movement, war, hope, and loss.

Drygas often describes himself as less a filmmaker than an archaeologist. The comparison is fitting. Rather than beginning with a thesis or political argument, he digs. He searches. He uncovers forgotten traces of human experience and assembles them into narratives that illuminate both the past and the present. As he once explained, he reaches beneath the surface, uncovering layer after layer in search of a deeper truth about the world he is describing.

Born in Poland and educated at the prestigious Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography (VGIK) in Moscow, Drygas originally trained as a fiction filmmaker. Yet his career changed dramatically when newly opened archives in post-communist Poland revealed stories that had been suppressed for decades. He discovered the story of Ryszard Siwiec, a Polish accountant who set himself on fire in protest against the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. The resulting film, Hear My Cry (1991), became an international sensation, earning the European Film Academy Award for Best Documentary and establishing Drygas as one of Europe's most important documentary voices.

Many of Drygas's works examine life under communist rule and the complex relationship between individual freedom and state power. Voice of Hope (2002) explored efforts to jam Radio Free Europe broadcasts. One Day in People's Poland (2005) reconstructed an ordinary day in communist Poland. Violated Letters (2010) exposed the vast machinery of state censorship that opened and read millions of private letters. State of Weightlessness (1994) examined Soviet cosmonauts not as heroes of technology but as human beings confronting the psychological consequences of extraordinary experiences.

What unites these films is curiosity. Drygas has repeatedly said that he is interested in understanding people rather than judging them. He approaches history at a human scale, seeking emotional truth within large political events. His documentaries reveal how ordinary individuals navigate systems of power, often finding small acts of dignity and resistance amid repression. 

Over time, archives became not merely a source of information for Drygas but his primary artistic medium. He developed a unique ability to transform historical footage into emotionally immediate cinema. While many archival documentaries rely heavily on narration or explanatory text, Drygas trusts viewers to engage directly with images. He searches for emotional resonance hidden within the frame itself.

That approach reaches its fullest expression in Trains.

The origins of the project stretch back more than a decade. In September 2014, Drygas wrote in his notebook that train travel could serve as a metaphor for life. People move from place to place. They read, eat, sleep, dream, depart, and arrive. Some go to war and return; others never return at all. 

Created from footage gathered from dozens of archives around the world, Drygas constructs an eighty-minute journey through twentieth-century Europe using only footage, sound design, and music.

The film begins with the wonder and excitement of travel. Railway stations bustle with activity. Passengers embark on journeys filled with possibility. Yet as the century unfolds, trains become witnesses to darker realities. Soldiers depart for battle. Refugees flee conflict. Prisoners are transported toward unimaginable destinies. Triumph and tragedy pass through the same stations and compartments. The railway becomes a recurring stage upon which history performs its dramas.

What makes Trains extraordinary is its ability to transform historical imagery into something deeply personal. Drygas does not present history as a sequence of events but as a succession of human experiences. Viewers find themselves looking into the faces of people who lived decades ago, sharing moments of anticipation, anxiety, joy, exhaustion, fear, and hope. 

The accomplishment is also technical. Drygas spent years researching archival collections and working with materials created across different eras, countries, and technologies. He and editor Rafał Listopad developed a structure that relies entirely on the emotional relationships between images rather than on explanatory text. The film's intricate sound design, created with Saulius Urbanavičius, gives the trains themselves living presence. Wheels, rails, whistles, and mechanical rhythms become part of the film's emotional architecture.

Trains won both Best Film and Best Editing at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), one of the world's most prestigious documentary festivals. The jury praised its bold and inventive use of archival material and its ability to make audiences feel haunted by both past and present.

Yet perhaps the greatest achievement of Trains is that it demonstrates why archives matter. In an era saturated with images, Drygas reminds us that historical footage is not merely evidence of the past. It is a record of human lives. His films rescue people from anonymity and return them to our collective memory.

Few filmmakers have done more to demonstrate the artistic possibilities of archival cinema. Fewer still have done so with such patience, rigor, and humanity. Like an archaeologist uncovering fragments of a lost civilization, Drygas continues to reveal that the past is never truly gone. It remains alive in images, waiting for someone to help us see it again.

The Maciej J. Drygas Collection is now available for the first time in North America. The six-film set includes Hear My Cry (1991), State of Weightlessness (1994), Voice of Hope (2002), One Day in People’s Poland (2005), Violated Letters (2010), and Abu Haraz (2013). The collection is streaming exclusively on Docuseek and is available for purchase from EPF Media. 

Trains is currently playing in theaters across the country. Check the official website, Instagram, and Facebook for upcoming screenings. It will be streaming on Docuseek and released on Blu-Ray later in 2026.

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