Film Festivals | Film Reviews | Massachusetts

The Boston Bike Film Festival: The Stories Behind the Biking

31 Oct , 2011  

Written by B. Walter Irvine | Posted by:

At the Boston Bike Film Festival, cycling documentaries face the challenge of putting civic issues on screen.

This years 7th annual Boston Bike Film Festival took place at the Brattle Theater in Cambridge, MA on October 15th. The selection included documentaries shot around the states and the world, and while the common theme was bikes, what these films revealed was the deeper common exploration of how to use biking to tell a story that isn’t really about biking at all.

Some documentaries shown at the festival tackled issues often on bicyclists’ minds: their relationship to the community and, of course, to drivers. Between the Curbs, directed by a team of students in the urban and environmental policy and planning master’s program at Tufts University, trod a middle ground familiar to journalists — trying to tell both sides of the conflict between motorists and dedicated two-wheelers.

Kris Carter, who edited and co-directed, explained that he attempted to recruit drivers from online forums to tell the other side of his story, but only actually got a few on camera to complain about bicyclists, which leaves the film a bit skewed in favor of the bikers. It was a reflection of the fact that drivers don’t normally need advocates because they already rule the road.

That given, Curbs does a good job of showing a variety of perspectives, from the more casual rider to the hardcore, from the apologist to the unapologetic. That last group is embodied by a courier who goes by the name “Nosepicker” and says of drivers, “I’m not going to stop unless I have to. They can complain all they want — it just means that I’m getting there faster than they are.” With one unicorn sock, he’s easily the most colorful interview subject in the film.

Along similar lines, Bring the Riding to the People, Julie Morey’s effort on behalf of the firm Elastic Lab, documents efforts in three communities to establish mountain bike trail parks. Unlike Between the Curbs, Bring the Riding is more much openly an advocate for its subjects. No voice-over is used to argue explicitly for biking, but the perspective of the film is clear in intertitles that tell us that the movement is “strengthening communities” and one park “transformed an inner city neighborhood and galvanized a sport.” It’s even suggested subtly in the way that titles sometimes slowly float toward the viewer, seeming to press the points made.

Morey didn’t actually come to the project with a passion for mountain biking, but wound up appreciating its enthusiasts: “I ended up liking these people and feeling terribly responsible for their story,” she said. She too tried to find people from the communities where parks were built to talk on camera about their opposition, but very often, they were the neighbors of the bikers. “They didn’t want to be the bad guy,” she explained.

Of the docs presented, maybe the most accomplished was Nicole DiSante’s O Veículo Fantástico, which asks why bicycles have not found support in the Brazilian city of Curitiba. In vivid color, its interviews are expertly framed in pleasing compositions that incorporate the surrounding space, and a fish-eye lens, while not particularly motivated, creates a fun change-up for interviews and shots that might have been more prosaic.

Filmmakers are always talking about the medium as a visual one, and it’s easy to see how these documentaries work at a disadvantage; their subject is ostensibly bicycling, but really it’s the problem of how to integrate bikes into a society founded on cars, which is a tough topic to represent visually, like all abstract ideas. Even Veículo, for all its technical beauty, struggles with this.

That might be why another documentary, Le Grand Cycle, by Kyril Dubé, took second place at the festival, as opposed to the docs that focused on the bicycle’s relationship to communities. Cycle’s subject, a Quebecois couple who tour the world on their bicycles, has the advantage of sights and photos the couple have accumulated of their exotic adventures and the subjects themselves are striking and even funny.

The questions raised by the more civic-minded docs about the marginalization of bicyclists are raised perhaps more poignantly here. Bouchard frankly discusses the trade-offs he and Lemieux have made by forgoing a secure present and future to live a dream. It’s a small grace note on broader issues fit into a film that is really about two fascinating people.

For all the effort put into these professional short documentaries, one of the two first place winners at the festival was a short that was shot in a day. Sarah Fleming’s Training Wheels follows the brief learning curve of photographer Tommy Kha as he learns to ride a bike for the first time at age 21. His progress is intercut with archival material from earnest post-World-War-II films urging responsibility in a patronizing tone.

Wheels falls into that category of films only incidentally about bicycling. What really makes Wheels work is Kha’s personality. At one point, he runs into a pole and falls off, but recovers standing up, quickly transitioning into a self-conscious pose that might be saying, “Can we ignore what just happened?” His timing is perfect and probably would have been impossible to fake. Later, a shot of his two trainers is interrupted by Tommy whizzing by, having mastered the bike. “What’s up, bitches!” he cackles.

To Fleming’s credit, the film is just about as long as its premise can stay fresh. “I don’t like a lot of plot in a short — if you’re going to tell something in five minutes you shouldn’t have a lot to tell,” she explained. “If you can find short, sweet, engaging stuff to film, the other stuff doesn’t matter.” Apparently the audience agreed.