NORD EXPRESS, Doc­u­men­tary Fes­ti­val Eind­hoven 2018

The film “Nord Express” recre­ates the 48 hours jour­ney by train from Paris to Moscow, and the pas­sen­gers on these tracks. Cross­ing the con­ti­nent in 48 hours is a new chal­lenge for inter-Euro­pean com­mu­ni­ca­tions. A chal­lenge con­tin­u­ous­ly met, despite two world wars, blue pen­cil marks on mil­i­tary maps, a wall divid­ing a city in two. The time – our own – is one of great upheaval, filled with the noise of machin­ery. In Paris, rail­way­men are lay­ing the new TGV lines; in Berlin, the wall is crum­bling; at Brest (USSR) the team is replac­ing the stan­dard gauge bogies with wide gauge bogies. Gali­na, the Sovi­et sleep­ing­car atten­dant, is mak­ing tea. In the cor­ri­dor, Theodore the stu­dent is look­ing out of the win­dow, just above the cur­tain. In front of painter Ben Wargin’s work­shop, in West Berlin, the wag­ons rush past at top speed. In a vari­ety of ways, the film view­er is like a trav­eller : his trip is one that has a start and an end­point, where in between the route is planned by the sto­ry that is showed. Some­times the sto­ry doesn’t seem to be going fast enough : it slight­ly slows down in its jour­ney. At oth­er times the devel­op­ments fol­low each oth­er at a rapid pace and the jour­ney pro­gress­es well. There is always a degree of aware­ness of its final des­ti­na­tion, but both this and the route towards the end is uncer­tain : the film is high­ly unpre­dictable, and its appeal large­ly derives from this uncer­tain­ty about the course of events. (Doc­u­men­tary Fes­ti­val Eind­hoven 2018)