Based on the beloved novella by Denis Johnson and directed by Academy Award nominee Clint Bentley, Train Dreams is the moving portrait of Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton), whose life unfolds during an era of unprecedented change in early 20th-century America. Robert grows into adulthood among the towering forests of the Pacific Northwest, where he helps expand the nation’s railroad empire alongside men as unforgettable as the landscapes they inhabit. An ode to a vanishing way of life, an ever-evolving world, and to the extraordinary possibilities that exist within even the most simple of existences, Train Dreams captures a time and place that are now long gone, and the people who built a bridge to a future they could only dream of.

To celebrate the release of Train Dreams, the Paris Theater is proud to present Frontier Visions: Train Dreams and Stories from Old Wild America. This screening series features eight films that, like Train Dreams, recreate a bygone frontier era to examine the challenges, hopes and dreams of ordinary people living and working in a world on the cusp of major change. From the troubled Old West town in Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller, to the post-Civil War South in Anthony Minghella’s Cold Mountain, to the mining town in the midst of the Oregon Territory in Jacques Tourneur’s Canyon Passage, the films in Frontier Visions reckon with the greed and intolerance often inherent in the building of a nation, while capturing the vivid personalities that existed in these communities, where the beauty of the natural world would soon give way to the blunt force of industrialization and modernization. These films revive ways of life that now feel lost to history, such as the rugged isolation of Robert Redford’s mountain man in Jeremiah Johnson and the community of Welsh miners in John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley, and in Arthur Penn’s Little Big Man, we reckon with how and by whom that history is recounted.

Each screening in Frontier Visions at the Paris will feature an exclusive video introduction by Train Dreams director Clint Bentley.

Frontier Visions includes a rare archival 35mm print of Joseph Anthony’s 1972 film Tomorrow, starring Robert Duvall and based on a story by William Faulkner, as well as 4K restorations of Canyon Passage and Days of Heaven, and a 4K remaster of McCabe and Mrs. Miller.

Films in this series include:  

Canyon Passage (1946, Jacques Tourneur) 4K Restoration
Cold Mountain (2003, Anthony Minghella) 
Days of Heaven (1978, Terrence Malick) 4K Restoration
How Green Was My Valley (1941, John Ford) 
Jeremiah Johnson (1972, Sydney Pollack) 
Little Big Man (1970, Arthur Penn) 
McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971, Robert Altman) 4K Remaster
Tomorrow (1972, Joseph Anthony) Archival 35mm print