Debut: 'Trains'
When I was a teenager living in New York City, my father and I would take the same subway line every morning. We’d take the 6 train to Grand Central Station; my father would walk to his office from there, and I’d walk to the Metro-North line inside Grand Central to go to high school. Every morning, waiting for the 6 to arrive, we’d stand on the platform, seeing the same familiar faces. Men, women, families, and strangers who were oddly familiar to us simply because of their consistent presence. This odd sense of connection is what makes Trains such a compelling short film.
Trains (2025) is a short film written and directed by Gawx, a Mexico-based filmmaker and artist. The film is incredibly short, running only a minute and a half, yet in that short runtime, Gawx paints an impactful picture of trains and those who use them to get around.
The short film has a fairly simple design: a short story written by Gawx is narrated over various B-roll footage of trains and passengers disembarking at various stops and navigating terminals. The film opens with a description of trains as “metal worms.” Despite this early description bringing to mind unpleasant images of earthworms writhing in the dirt, upon reflection, Gawx seems to be commenting on the seemingly mindless way we, as commuters, take trains for granted.
Through his narration, we as an audience began to understand Gawx’s description of trains. They are worms in the sense that people do not think about them, yet similar to worms, they are crucial to maintaining a stable ecosystem — in Gawx’s argument, maintaining a social ecosystem.
Gawx describes the all-too-familiar feeling of familiarity one has with strangers on the train. From seeing the same people every day during a morning commute to seeing a peculiar-looking person on the train one day out of seemingly nowhere. Gawx uses rapid cuts of footage depicting families and people sitting on trains, casually looking around, to accentuate this point.
Trains are a form of social stability in Gawx’s perspective. While they are necessary for getting from one point to another, he is stating that they allow people to imagine, to form false narratives about the people around them. Who are they? Why are they dressed a certain way? What do they do for work? These are questions passengers on trains will likely never have answers to, and yet they are questions that, in Gawx’s mind, make us human and connect us on the base level of curiosity.
This point is made even clearer by the end of the short film. Gawx posits that no matter who people are “above ground,” “underground” in the mass transit system that snakes underneath skyscrapers and concrete, everyone is united and liberated from the constraints of the world above.
No matter who people are, once they take a train, they are just like everyone else. Everyone waits, checks the time, worries about a delay, and grips the pole inside a train car a little tighter during a sharp turn in a tunnel. In Gawx’s mind, there is a strange comfort in knowing that in those few minutes on a train, everyone is one, everyone is the same.
The short film ends with Gawx stating that upon boarding a train, everything is revealed about a person. This narration plays over footage taken from the very front of a train car, speedily snaking its way through a curving tunnel, heading to some unknown destination. This shot, coupled with this narration, strangely brings to mind F. Scott Fitzgerald’s remarks at the end of The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald describes humans as boats, moving forward despite being pushed endlessly back into the past.
This idea is seen in Trains. The idea that there is something unknown about going on a train, similar to moments in life, is that there is no real idea of direction, yet those moments on a train provide a brief sense of purpose and determination. Fitzgerald believed that we as humans had no true direction, no matter how hard we tried, but perhaps trains can provide that direction, even if only for a fleeting moment.
