Railway Sleepers preceded by A Child Already Knows

Director: Tiffany Sia, Sompot Chidgasornpongse

2017 / 135min / DCP

Shot over the course of eight years on every line and spur of Thailand’s rail system, its mountains of footage culled down to appear as one 48-hour journey, Chidgasornpongse’s Apichatpong Weerasethakul–produced documentary is both a mesmeric travelogue and a portrait of a country and a people in flux. Screens with A Child Already Knows, in which Sia, employing Mao-era kid’s cartoons and other archival morsels, recounts her family’s flight from Shanghai to Hong Kong.

“The train is unusually vibrant in Chidgasornpongse’s Railway Sleepers, maybe because the windows are open in most of the compartments, which are full of people, music, the occasional grasshopper, and hawkers of fermented pork and Pepsi. By contrast, the parallel journeys in A Child Already Knows—a train ride once taken by Sia’s father, and a parade of 1950s cartoons produced by Shanghai Television—are subdued and tinged with danger.” —Series curator Genevieve Yue

A Child Already Knows (Tiffany Sia, 2024, 33 mins)

Railway Sleepers (Sompot Chidgasornpongse, 2017, 102 mins)

Distributor: Video Data Bank, Grasshopper Film

Part of Trains: Long Distance Passages