En passant

Where the Rhine rises, a train journey also commences. Directors Mirjam Boelsums and Lony Scharenborg took the Rembrandt Expres from the Swiss town of Chur to terminus Amsterdam. In the process, they filmed not only the course and banks of the mighty Rhine River, they also captured the three dimensions of a railway trip. In the first place, the scenery whizzing by, with the omnipresent stream. Secondly, the random company in the carriage; Heinz-Gerd for example, whose family sympathised with the Nazis, Maartje, who has just visited her daughter in an asthma clinic, and a lonely woman with her dog ('I wouldn't mind if it were finished'). The interviewees talk about their lives off-screen, which produces the third element in the film: the travellers' stream of thoughts, alternated with excerpts from Richard Wagner's Das Rheingold.