-3.png)
All Aboard for the Great Unknown: Marie Brassard’s The Train Comes to NewCinema/Features+
- 2 days ago
- 4 min read
A distant train whistle. A gifted child awake at night. A parallel world waiting somewhere beyond the suburbs of 1960s Quebec.
Marie Brassard’s The Train (Le Train) arrives on Whush as part of the NewCinema/Features+ showcase, bringing with it a dreamlike collision of memory, art, counterculture and science fiction.
Written and directed by acclaimed Canadian theatre-maker and filmmaker Marie Brassard, The Train begins with Agathe, a gifted child with asthma growing up in suburban Quebec with her mother, Thérèse. An artist with a melancholy disposition, Thérèse encourages her daughter’s imagination through her drawings.
And then, at night, comes the train.
Its distant whistle becomes a gateway for Agathe, feeding visions of another existence — a strange parallel world somewhere beyond the boundaries of everyday life.
Years pass. Quebec enters the 1970s, and Agathe, now a teenager, finds herself drawn into the era’s bohemian counterculture. There she meets Frank, a young science-fiction writer whose story sends her imagination — and the film itself — somewhere considerably stranger.
What begins in childhood fantasy gradually moves towards dystopia and what Brassard calls “the great unknown.”
Dreaming at the Edge of an Era
Behind the film’s fantasy lies a very real moment of social and cultural upheaval.
Brassard sets The Train against second-wave feminism and the hippie movement, but deliberately turns her camera away from the celebrated cultural capitals and famous names normally associated with the period. Her interest lies instead with people creating art far from the spotlight.
These are artists working anonymously, practising what Brassard describes as a kind of “quiet resistance.”
Rather than looking back nostalgically at an idealised counterculture, The Train asks what happens to the people who lived creatively but disappeared from cultural memory — the painters, writers and dreamers who never became famous, yet imagined different ways of living all the same.
“I wanted to breathe life into these unassuming artists, who loved to dream a different world,” Brassard explains, describing figures who eventually became “spectres with the shifting sands of time.”
That sense of disappearance hangs over The Train. The film looks backwards, but something in the distance is also moving towards us.
From Counterculture to Science Fiction
The train itself becomes the perfect image for that tension.
For the young Agathe, its whistle promises escape. It suggests another place, another reality, perhaps even another version of herself. But as childhood gives way to adolescence and she encounters Frank, fantasy begins to acquire a more unsettling dimension.
His science-fiction story propels Agathe towards a mysterious future — one that Brassard describes as dystopian and “dangerously approaching.”
That collision between memory and futurism gives The Train its unusual character. It is simultaneously a period film, an intimate portrait of a mother and daughter, an exploration of forgotten artists and a journey into speculative fiction.
Brassard describes the result as a hybrid film, and that seems fitting for an artist whose career has repeatedly crossed boundaries between theatre, performance, writing, technology and visual storytelling.
Her surreal work has been presented in more than twenty countries across Europe, the Americas and Asia. In 2016, Brassard was awarded the Ordre des arts et des lettres du Québec, and in 2022 she received the Siminovitch Prize, Canada's major theatre award, recognising the innovative nature of her work as a director.
With The Train, those theatrical and surrealist instincts move into cinema.
A Cast Across Generations
Agathe is portrayed at different stages of her life by Thalie Rhainds and Electra Codina Morelli, while Larissa Corriveau (Viking, Répertoire des villes disparues) plays her mother, Thérèse.
Lenni Kim (Fem) appears as the young science-fiction writer Frank, with a cast that also includes Maxim Gaudette — known internationally for Denis Villeneuve’s Incendies and Polytechnique — and Christopher Heyerdahl as Jack.
Behind the film is producer Catherine Chagnon, whose credits include Yunan and Bootlegger.
The result brings together established Canadian screen talent with younger performers to tell a story that is itself concerned with generations: what is inherited, what disappears, and what survives through imagination.
From Montréal to NewCinema/Features+
The Train received its world premiere on 18 October 2025 at the Festival du nouveau cinéma de Montréal, where it was selected as the festival’s Closing Film.
The film also earned Brassard a nomination for the Directors Guild of Canada’s Jean-Marc Vallée Discovery Award, further marking The Train as a significant step in her transition into feature filmmaking.
Now, as part of NewCinema/Features+ on Whush, the film has another platform from which to begin its journey.
And journey is perhaps the right word.
Because beneath its period setting and science-fiction imagery, The Train appears to be interested in something deeply human: our ability to imagine another world when the one immediately around us feels too small.
Agathe hears a train in the darkness and wonders where it might lead. Her mother draws. Frank writes stories. Artists create without knowing whether anyone in the future will remember their names.
Most eventually disappear.
But the work remains.
And somewhere in the distance, the train keeps moving.
The Train, written and directed by Marie Brassard, will stream on Whush as part of the NewCinema/Features+ showcase.
Comments