Moto Film Fest

MOTO FILM FEST

UP FRONT

EDITOR’S LETTER

ART FOR BIKE’S SAKE

Motorcycling is just about as good as it gets for a movie topic. In the decades since motorcycles and film have coexisted, there have been some magnificent pieces made—Easy Rider, Faster, and On Any Sunday marking just a few of the truly great ones.

Thanks to the proliferation of affordable cameras, editing tech, and ease of publishing, we have a new era of creative people using motorcycles to tell stories of life, love, and adventure.

I was honored this year to be a judge at the third annual Motorcycle Film Festival in Brooklyn and screened about 30 films both short and long. The MFF was first conceived by Corinna Mantlo and Jack Drury, with our Custom & Style Editor Paul d’Orleans thrown in the mix as chief judge.

One of the most refreshing things was the number of women enthusiasts in the audience and as key parts of the festival itself, as well as makers of films. It was a great example of humans who happen to be women enjoying and enriching a sport they never should have been excluded from in the past.

In fact, my personal favorite piece from the fest was directed by a young woman— Two-Stroked: A Love Story about mopeds and moped life. I’m a secret moped lover because I got started riding on the road as a 14-year-old by buying a pair of Batavus HS-50 mopeds. Director Jacqui Carrière is a 22-year-old film student at Emerson College who was also a key player in this documentary/narrative about a small moped shop in the Boston area—a totally charming piece that touches on the basic wonder of two-wheeled movement and the community surrounding it.

Best of Fest went to Out of Nothing, a feature-length documentary directed by Chad DeRosa about four working men in the Pacific Northwest who spend pretty much all their free time and energy on prepping for Bonneville. It’s beautifully put together and gorgeous to watch. It’s set to air on ESPN, so watch for it.

The week of screenings began with Easy Rider, which was magnificent to see on a big screen and underlined one of the main reasons you’d go to a theater instead of watching on your phone or computer. Filmmaker and activist Cliff Vaughs and bike builder Larry Marcus were in the audience. Both had worked on Easy Rider before being fired after some initial filming, and both had been key in the building of Captain America and the Billy Bike, though neither were given any credit for this until recently. This was the first time Vaughs, now in his 70s, had ever seen Easy Rider, and it was as much fun for me to watch him watch the film as it was to experience it myself.

Said d’Orleans, “Like Cliff, I'd never seen ER on a big screen. It drove home how crucial those bikes were to the success of that film; the shots lingering over those choppers were as evocative as a European nude scene. There was electricity in the room. Everyone present knew Cliff had never seen ER, so we all had new eyes with him.”

Vaughs’ post-screen comments centered around how wonderful motorcycling was and his three crosscountry trips on a Harley-Davidson chopper, the final scene of the movie based around his experience of being shot at from a moving pickup truck for being a black man on a chopper riding through the South.

The high quality of the finalists had judges (including custom builder and film star himself Shinya Kimura) and show organizers backstage just minutes before the final awards ceremony debating which films would win.

For a full list of the movies that won and background on the event, visit motorcyclefilmfestival.com.

MARK HOYER

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

THIS MONTH'S STATS

70 APPROXIMATE NUMBER OF FILMS SUBMITTED TO MFF 2015

nine TIMES I EXCEEDED 100 MPH ON THE NINJA H2 IN 13 MILES

212 HORSEPOWER OF THE UNCORKED HONDA RC213V-S