Bike aficionados gear up for film festivals
This is the Year of the Rat, according to the Chinese calendar. But 2008 may well go down in Boston as the Year of the Bike: The city's new bike lanes are almost ready for riders, more people than ever are dusting off Schwinns and pulling on Lycra for the morning commute, and not one but two film festivals devoted to bicycles will roll onto area screens in the coming weeks.
The homegrown Boston Bike Film Fest has been around for four years, quietly drawing a few hundred people to its annual showing of shorts, animations, and feature-length homages to pedal power.
Now, for the first time, it's being joined by a bigger, splashier, and more worldly event: the international Bicycle Film Festival, which travels to 17 cities around the country and in Europe, Australia, and Asia. Last year, riding a surge of bicycle appreciation and hipster fashion, the festival drew more than 100,000 people. The international fest will stop in the Hub this Thursday, with films screening Friday and Saturday at the Somerville Theater and the Institute for Contemporary Art.
"The Bicycle Film Festival is trying to celebrate every possible aspect of cycling," says Seth Davis, who is producing the event in Boston. "If you show up in a car, that's fine, as long as you're excited about bikes."
The worldwide festival was born of an accident in New York City in October 2000. Founder Brendt Barbur was cycling on Third Avenue when a suddenly opened car door knocked him into the path of a bus. Hospitalized for weeks with injuries ranging from a dislocated shoulder to a fractured jaw, he resolved to create something positive out of that unpleasant experience.
"I thought if we could celebrate bikes, people might embrace them," he says.
Barbur is introducing the festival to Boston with a selection of 50 of its greatest hits, presented in six different programs heavy on shorts, including four by Bostonian Lucas Brunelle - something of a star in cycling circles, according to Barbur: "He goes to Tokyo and people want his autograph."
Brunelle has made a name for himself by strapping cameras to his helmet and riding in places not necessarily meant for bicycles - like highways, the frozen Charles River, and the ocean floor.
"I love to ride underwater. It's one of my favorite hobbies," says Brunelle, 37, who once worked as a bicycle messenger, now owns a Beacon Hill information technology company, and is not joking. He dons a wetsuit and an oxygen tank, straps 70 pounds of lead weight to his body, rides to the beach and pedals into the surf. "I just love going down there and going for a spin."
His don't-try-this-at-home films have become Internet hits. "I receive hundreds of e-mails a week from people telling me how they are riding now because of the videos," he says. "That's my favorite thing to see - people enjoying bikes."
The festival offers plenty of shorts in addition to Brunelle's, including a one-minute animation called "Some Things Ride a Bicycle," from 2006; a four-minute 2007 music video called "Scraper Bikes," about tricked-out two-wheeled rides; an eight-minute film from this year about a trek across Africa, "Goodbye Tomorrow"; and - for the socially conscious - "The Recycle a Bicycle Film," about an environmental education program in New York City's public schools, from 2007.
There are longer films, too: "Road to Roubaix," a 75-minute documentary about the prestigious 160-mile race held annually in France since 1896; "Bikecar," a 65-minute piece about a group of friends who pedaled a four-person vehicle across the Northwest, pulling a trailer with snowboard gear and seeking snow; and "Pedal," a 52-minute documentary about New York bicycle messengers that premiered in 2001 at the South by Southwest film festival.
Members of the cycling advocacy group MassBike will valet park festivalgoers' bicycles on Friday and Saturday for free. Executive director David Watson says he's glad the bigger festival is here - it's all about bike love, after all - but hopes it doesn't crowd out the smaller Boston Bike Film Festival, which is scheduled for Oct. 17-18 this year.
Telecommunications analyst Cat Bryant started the Boston festival and pulls it together for no pay. Unlike Barbur's bigger event, hers is a nonprofit whose earnings go to local bike-centric charities, including MassBike. "It's such a small festival that I don't really have PR," she says. "I can't even get an intern because I can't pay them."
But Davis, who works at a Cambridge bicycle shop and helped Bryant with her festival last year, says pedalers here have an insatiable appetite. "People who are into bikes in Boston," he says, "are really into bikes."
For tickets and information about the BFF, go to www.bicyclefilmfestival.com.
Emma Brown can be reached at ebrown@globe.com. 