Australian travel legends Mal and Mike Leyland give us a crackerjack billabong desert adventure. 

The vintage films at this festival are popular not simply because of deep saturated colours inherent in the Kodachrome 16mm film saturation process but for another reason altogether. The older films were always made by people who had no concept of support vehicles, risk assessments or the notion of the celebrity ‘presenter’. The guys who shot the film, were in the film.

In 1972, doubtless influenced by the Nevada chase scene in Diamonds Are Forever, the Leyland brothers set off on an attempt to conduct the first east-west crossing of Australia’s Simpson Desert by balloon-tyred Honda trike. These goofy ATVs have virtually disappeared from the public conciousness but their lunar credentials made them ideal for crossing 600 miles of nasty desert.

Far from being a boy’s own adventure, this trip is quite the Leyland family affair; Mal’s wife Laraine keeps up the pace astride one of the trikes, attired in a fabulous psychedelic bikini that is more St. Tropez than Simpson Desert, while Mike’s wife accompanies the trip in a Series 2 Land Rover with her toddler daughter and the family dogs by her side. The sheer indifference to health and safety is enormously refreshing, and this simple fact alone means there will always be a corner of the curators’ heart marked ‘Leyland Brothers’.

16mm Colour    62 mins

A group of South African motorcyclists venture off the beaten track in Lesotho and end up in a tricky section entombed in mud…

They are rescued by some local villagers and there begins a special relationship. One of the riders takes an artfully composed family portrait but on his return to the big city, realises it is a gift in waiting. He takes a glossy print, sources some mahogany, makes up a lovely frame which a year later, he delivers in person back to the family. This festival is hugely enhanced with such humbling content…

Colour video    10 mins

Good-time curator Austin Vince’s latest film is an evangelical call to arms to anyone who wants undiluted, 24 carat adventure motorcycling pleasure.

His seven-man, Anglo-American team heads south to the sun, riding 5000 miles in a month from London to the heart of the Sahara, almost entirely off-road! Needless to say, they have hardly any gear, money or preparation but still demonstrate that long-distance expedition motorcycling is well within everyone’s grasp. It also serves to show that both Americans and Englishmen can enjoy a warm welcome in the Islamic Republic of Mauritania.

Colour HD video/Super 8      68 mins

Alastair Humphreys is the UK’s leading adventurer. In this short he compresses 45 days of around-the-clock rowing into 6 minutes.

This is a man with a message, open your mind-garden and let Humphreys plant his seed therein… ‘Expeditions are about pitting yourself against nature. This project has frustrated me because much of the struggle has instead been within ourselves (nausea, hunger, exhaustion) and our immediate environment (seats designed during the Spanish Inquisition). Last night though I experienced the addictive sensation I have enjoyed so often on hills and mountains, deserts and rivers. That is the outpouring of a kind of glory that lights up the mind of a man and which comes with surviving and thriving in the world’s wild places and relishing the variety, the beauty and the ferocity of nature.’

The first film to be screened at this festival shot entirely on Super 8 – hurrah for this format!

Tom Lloyd spent many exquisite English summers living with a roaming collective of dreamers and alternative lifestyle practitioners. He chronicled their simple horse-drawn utopia on his whirring Soviet clockwork camera and if this utterly perfect short film doesn’t have you resigning from your ‘cube’ and hitting the road then nothing will. Live before you die…

Colour super 8     6 mins
web.dreamtimefilm.co.uk

Full colour US Army Corps of Engineers uncut, uncensored, bulldozer action. Prepare to faint at the quality of improvised timber bridges in this film! 

In a country where no one flies, two friends can inspire a nation by putting everything on the line.

Following a dream, Canadian paraglider pilot Benjamin Jordan travels to Malawi to teach children the joys of kite flying. There he meets Godfrey, a young man who has always dreamt of flying through has never had the means.

The odd pair tour the country on bikes, building kites with local children while motivating them to follow their dreams, no matter the challenge. They head for Malawi’s highest peak, from where, after weeks of ground training, the two will attempt to fly down, making Godfrey the first Malawian paraglider pilot.

Observing himself through the eyes of the Malawians, Jordan must come to grips with truths about who he is as a westerner while Godfrey is required to reach deeper into his faith than ever before to believe that the paraglider he’s been carrying can truly carry him in return.

Colour video 46 mins
www.theboywhoflies.com

More seat-of-your-pants unfeasibly-overloaded Royal Enfield high-altitude Himalayan madness from Gaurav Jani, one of the legends of the genre.

There is an unwritten credo at the festival that ‘anyone can do this’ and we work hard to promote that notion. However, every now and then someone comes along to contradict that premise. Gaurav Jani is not just another average guy. He is a gifted multi-award winning film-maker, a profoundly deep thinker and two-wheeled philosopher. When someone like this makes a travel film, we should watch it.

This movie follows a motorcycle expedition on uncharted roads across the Himalayan state of Arunachal Pradesh, situated in North-east India. But more than that, it’s a study of friendship, camaraderie and the quiet humility of five motorcyclists in the face of unforgiving terrain and massive luggage overload.

With the same format as Jani’s masterpiece Riding Solo To The Top Of The World and like all films at this festival, shot with no back-up vehicle or film crew, we see parts of India hardly seen, filmed or explored.  The documentary captures the interactions and experiences of the riders who are trying to chart a route, which according to everyone else, does not exist.

Colour video  87 mins
www.dirttrackproductions.com

A break from the high adventure for just a moment… A celebration of the VW camper van and its quietly understated role in getting tens of thousands of people ‘out there’.

There are loads of four wheeled vehicles that exude the musky smell of iconography; from James Bond’s Aston Martin to David Hasselhof’s smugly metrosexual  ‘K.I.T.’ car. However, few have generated  such an evocative  bouquet of ‘adventure’ in a way that could be smelled by all, however humble their travel credentials.  This is the remarkable story of a vehicle that became the symbol of free-spirited abandon – a nostalgic tale of freedom, love, friendship, breakdowns and, if you want, adventures.

‘The Bus’ playfully explores how a predictably humourless German utility vehicle metamorphosed into a cultural icon that represents freedom, liberty and the open road, defining and connecting generations of fun-lovers everywhere. Beginning in Germany with the vehicle’s functional creation, into a wild ride that changes the world forever, ‘The Bus’ is an ‘off-the-grid’ joy from beginning to end. From Wolfsburg to Hollywood, Burning Man to Baja, people from all walks of life share their stories and passion in ‘The Bus’. This is actually a movie about living your dreams rather than simply a story about a van with a bed in it.

HD Colour video  62 mins
www.busmovie.com

THE BUS MOVIE – Official Trailer from Firewater Film Company on Vimeo.

The UK and US premiere of an impossibly rare, yet superb collection of vintage colour Iranian travel documentaries.

In 1954 Issa and Abdullah Omidvar were in their twenties and growing restless in the suburbs of Tehran. In that golden age before Iran de-selected itself from the high table of western nations it was still possible for youngsters to dream ‘large’. The brothers ordered a couple of 500cc Matchless bikes (yes, they had a dealership in Tehran!) and set off to see the world and make films about it! They shot incredibly sensitive, stand-alone anthropological documentaries about Eskimos, Amazonian cannibals, Polynesian islanders and much more. They edited them on the road and then held impromptu screenings in universities, village halls and arts centres, charging an entrance fee and thus financing the next leg of the trip! Yes, they really were the original Persian DIY Adventure Motorcycle Showmen!  It’s getting over-used at this festival but seriously, you’ve never seen anything like this before!

NB the original masters of these films have been lost forever. We will be screening from the Omidvar’s ‘working’ prints that they ran through their projector. Please accept that there is substantial scratching and surface noise.

16mm colour   60 mins

www.omidvar-brothers.com