'Empire Builder' documents a three-day odyssey to Milwaukee by train to visit a stricken father in the hospital. Filmed with a 16mm Bolex Reflex camera and hand-developed in buckets of photo chemicals, it presents the true events of this family story chronologically as they were documented, in flashes and glimpses, as imperfect and fragmented as human memory itself. Empire Builder sets its verite narrative in the context of a crumbling city and civilization whose desperate hope for salvation lies in an ever-growing tangle of technology.