Riding the Highline
2015 · United States
Directed by Kai Carlson-Wee, Anders Carlson-Wee
Genres: adventure, documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, mythic
Poet brothers Kai and Anders Carlson-Wee hop freight trains along the Burlington Highline route from Minneapolis to Wenatchee, Washington, weaving their own poetry, still photography, and narrative scenes into a lyrical record of riding the rails across the American West.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Two poets literally riding freights and turning it into verse-spliced cinema—it's the kind of self-aware romantic gesture that should be insufferable, but the brothers somehow dodge the trap by refusing to mythologize themselves too hard; they're too busy actually *being* on the line to perform the mythology.
The Carlson-Weeds inherit a lineage stretching from the essay film through lyric documentary, and their formal architecture—braiding verse, still photography, and staged narrative into a single fugal form—demonstrates the kind of compositional rigor that justifies multimedia collage rather than indulges it.
The decision to let the *photography* breathe as its own temporal register—those stills holding their own against the moving image—is what transforms this from a poetic stunt into something that actually *feels* like memory and landscape speaking together.
Festivals
- Napa Valley Film Festival 2015, Special Jury Prize
- Arizona International Film Festival 2016, Audience Choice Award
- Rochester International Film Festival, Shoestring Award
- Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival 2016