Tickets

Tickets is a 2005 anthology drama set largely aboard a train travelling from Austria toward Rome. Three intertwined stories unfold among passengers: a professor who daydreams about a woman he never had, three boisterous Scottish football supporters heading to a match, and a widow travelling with a community-service volunteer to a memorial for her late husband. Along the way, a family of Albanian refugees moves between carriages. The encounters turn on class and nationality, politeness and rudeness, and the chances people have to treat each other decently.

The film is a collaborative project divided into three episodes, directed by Ermanno Olmi, Abbas Kiarostami and Ken Loach, who also wrote the screenplay with Paul Laverty. It was produced through several European companies. The cast of twenty-seven credited performers includes Carlo Delle Piane as the professor, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi as a public-relations specialist, Silvana De Santis, Filippo Trojano, and Martin Compston and Gary Maitland as two of the Scottish fans.

For Kiarostami, Tickets came between The Wind Will Carry Us and To Each His Own Cinema, the sixteenth of the twenty-two films he directed. For Loach, it followed September 11 and preceded The Wind That Shakes the Barley, the eleventh of his twenty films. It runs 109 minutes. On IMDb it holds 6.9 from about 2,900 votes, and on TMDB 6.5 from a much smaller sample. Six critics' reviews average 7.7.