Train to Adulthood centres on the ‘children’s train’ built in 1948 in communist Hungary, whose operation ever since then has been entrusted to teenagers. In the past, the ‘pioneer railway’, where children could be engine drivers or conductors, sell tickets or dispatch trains, used to be the dream of every boy and girl between Leipzig and Vladivostok. Today, this relic from the past provides one of the very few contexts that offer children the sense of security they need as they grow up, while all the institutions that are supposed to do that prove either absent or ineffective. Acutely observed and beautifully photographed, Klára Trencsényi’s film sets this anachronistic and utopian project in a dialogue with the present, by looking at the way in which it helps a bunch of children learn about responsibility and survive in a world where they are confronted from an early age with the harsh realities of liberal capitalism. Sitting on the threshold of adulthood, twins Viktor and Karmen, and their friend Gergo, the main protagonists of the film, operate old-fashioned switches, levers and telephones, line up for the flag ceremony, while also taking decisions about their lives. Meanwhile, the twins’ single mother works hard but earns hardly enough to buy food, and Gergő lives with his grandparents because his parents are forced to work abroad.