“There is plenty of hope. An infinite amount of hope. But not for us.” With this quote from Franz Kafka, Trains opens.

It hangs like a dark cloud over the archival film, which paints a collective portrait of people in 20th-century Europe, their hopes and longings, their dramas and tragedies. Imposing images of the assembly of steam locomotives and railroad cars look like an ode to human ingenuity and labor. Festively dressed people travel by train. But these joyous scenes quickly give way to soldiers being transported to the front-quickly followed by images of an evacuation of civilians, a ragged procession of prisoners of war and soldiers with amputated limbs.

Times change, the pattern repeats itself. The archival footage in this wordless film describes an inescapable cycle of joy and destruction, of beauty and bitterness. The image of a tangle of train tracks and switches raises an inevitable question: which track does humanity choose?