Scripted by former railwayman Rob Dawber The Navigators lays bare the unappetising choice faced by railway workers after the still contentious privatization of British Rail in the mid-1990s. Either they can continue existing jobs for lower pay and safety standards, or accept redundancy and break up long-established teams, the quality of whose work is at least as much due to personal camaraderie as effective management. The film’s tragic conclusion is as inevitable as it is shocking — and matched by real-life incidents, since filming commenced in the wake of the 2001 Hatfield train crash. It went straight to television in Britain, but was a top-ten box-office hit in Paris, whose audiences must have been bewildered by the British notion of how to run a railway. – BFI