Railbound

Railbound is a poetic film built directly from the photographs of the prolific American photographer, Mike Brodie. The film pushes the boundaries of generative AI, indistinguishable from live action footage. Told through the reflective voice of a father chasing the memory of motion — a youth spent riding the rails, living between places, before the world ever decided who he was.

The project was created during the inaugural Google Labs Generative AI Program (Flow Sessions) — a six-week experimental filmmaking residency that brought together a highly selective group of ten international artists to explore new narrative forms using Flow, Google’s generative video model. In Railbound, the film required an entirely different production pipeline: one where still photographs served as the source of performance, movement, and emotional pacing. The result is a hybrid form that sits apart from typical generative AI work — closer to memory than simulation.

Mike Brodie is widely considered America’s most iconic train-hopping photographer. In his early twenties, he rode freight trains across the United States, creating a body of work that has been exhibited at SFMOMA, the Berkeley Museum of Art, and has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and American PHOTO. His photobooks, A Period of Juvenile Prosperity, Tones of Dirt and Bone, and Failing have become seminal documents of contemporary American photography, widely recognized for their raw intimacy and lived perspective. “Like many mediums before us, photography as an art form is dying. If this project can keep the spirit of my photos alive, through the ages, then so be it,” says Brodie.

Railbound is written and directed by award-winning filmmaker Jonathan Perry, releasing on the precipice of his upcoming live action film Sentinelese. Perry first gained recognition for his acclaimed film Subnivean, acquired by Amazon Prime—making him the youngest director on any major streaming platform at just 17. With the growth of his production company Muybridge, Jonathan continues to redefine the boundaries of visual storytelling as an AI filmmaker. Perry sifted through Brodie’s extensive unreleased archive of images to create this surreal new perspective on transient life. “I grew up by the railroad,” says Perry. “This film validates the extraordinary hidden world most folks haven't seen."

Visual direction and AI work were led by Alex Naghavi, an award-winning AI filmmaker and creative director working at the forefront of cinema, design, and generative tools. Naghavi was selected for the first Google Labs’ Flow Sessions cohort, where Railbound’s hybrid production approach was developed. “The responsibility was to honor these iconic images in a way that did justice to the original material — to bring life and soul to the frames, enough to make you wonder whether the moment was ever still at all,” says Naghavi.