Lars’s films have appeared in the Chicago Underground Film Festival, the Caucophany Film Festival, at San Francisco Film Arts, the Humboldt International Film Festival and now for the fourth time at Filmed By Bike. Lars is currently working on the TNT drama series Leverage and he has previously worked on Coraline, The Hunted, and several TV and film productions shot in and around Portland.

Lars’s most recent film Go! Paperboy! will show in Program 1. Program details >>

One night, unable to sleep and continuously thinking of movie ideas, Ogden was struck with nostalgia for the fond memories of his youth, and he came up with the concept for Derailed, which will debut at this year’s Filmed by Bike. “The question arose,” he says, “can someone return to those idyllic carefree times while being weighed down by life’s trivialities?”

To find out Ogden’s take on that question, you’ll have to come see Derailed, which is part of the Pump it Up program. Showings: Fri 7,9 // Sat 5 // Sun 7,9

Ricardo Portilho, a Brazilian bike enthusiast and art director, heard about Filmed by Bike from the Amsterdam-based Gerrit Rietveld Academy mailing list. His film “I Just Can’t Forget These Things” will show in our 2008 festival.The impetus for the movie came from an assignment Portilho received from Kosmopolis, an organization from Rotterdam that works with cross-cultural relationships in The Netherlands. I wanted to make something about my parents,” Portilho says, “and how I was relating to some memories about them while living away from Brazil.” The resulting piece is Portilho’s reflection on phrases he associates with his parents combined with visual beauty seen as he rides his bike in Amsterdam.

Over the course of the year that he lived in Amsterdam, it was more than the movie project that helped him fall in love with riding bikes. “In Amsterdam I would say that biking is something that’s is just part of everybody’s life. Everybody–I mean everybody–has a bike,” he says. “People grow up using a bike for their daily tasks. You see mothers carrying babies on a bike, two-storey bikes, dogs in bikes, there’s even a bar on bike wheels. The car and truck drivers, they are also bikers when not on their cars – so there’s a lot of respect to the bikes in the city traffic. The country itself is very flat, so bikes are very effective to go around, day or night, to work or to party. Sometimes after a party it gets a bit more difficult to make turns.”

All of this biking in Amsterdam has spoiled Portilho. “Actually having the bike as your primary means of transportation in a place like Amsterdam gives you an unbelievable sense of freedom. After having lived in this context, I can’t avoid thinking “what a drag” every time I have to drive a car and get into another traffic jam.”

Portilho has produced a couple of other short movies and animations that are mostly experimental or personal stories. He also work on commercial movies and music videos.

You can view Portilho’s movie as part of the Bikers Win program that shows Saturday at 7 and 9 and Sunday at 5.

This year there will be two separate programs that run over three days and eight screenings.

Congratulations to all the filmmakers who made the cut! [ program ]

Which screening are you going to? Are you excited? Do you have your eyes on one of those raffle prizes? What are you wearing?

[ read the profiles ]

He found his two stars on the streets of London. Dave, the skater, was well known for overheating his bearings doing 60mph on alpine switchbacks. Bills says he heard that and immediately knew he had his man. Khaled is an actual courier and the central biker in the movie, “He is a powerful rider” says Bill. “He brought his own strong sense of style to the project. If it hadn’t have been for him, I definitely wouldn’t have found the Filmed By Bike festival, and might not even have had the motivation to finish the project.”

Khaled currently lives in Vancouver, B.C. and will be coming to Portland for the festival.

So what’s next for Bill? At the moment he’s working on a few commercials, writing a stage play, and working on a few film scripts, one of which, he says, “involves bike messengers but will hopefully be better than Quicksilver.”

And she had never made a movie before, but she was motivated. ” Riding my bike and messengering in the city changed my life. There is great community among messengers and biking made me strong, not just physically, but in my mind as well. It sharpened my senses and taught me to stand strong and firm, to speak up, even yell if I have to, and not feel bad about it. It gave me a confidence that nothing in my life ever had before. It really empowered me. ”

It wasn’t all fun and games putting the movie together, with a broken camera, damaged footage, re-shooting, and lots of learning, but in the end, Ashira says, the piece became her homage to riding. In short, Ashira declares that riding bikes saved her life, so the least she could do was to make a movie about it.

“I hoped to give voice to, and make room for, these awesome women that I knew, who were living every day, making the city flow, and owning the streets. I hoped to inspire other girls to get on bikes and get empowered in their own lives and ride themselves silly. And I hoped to give people a chance to get over their stereotypes of who could do what, and why.”

In the piece, Joshua says, he “cast bicycle messengers as mythological heroes in our contemporary society. They can do things that no one else can, they risk life and limb for their task, they live by their own codes, and they are simultaneously admired and feared by the general public. Like comic superheroes, a lot of them even wear tights. Usually we need to go off into fantasy worlds in find romanticism these days… its pretty fun find some of those elements right here in our midst. I’ve tried to do it in a way that is fair and not offensive, (mostly by leaving lots of bits mysterious so that the viewer’s imagination has a lot to chew on), and so far the reactions from messengers has been positive, so that’s good.”

Next up Joshua is working on a short fully animated piece about climate change. He’s also developing concepts for a more narrative extension of Bicycle Messengers and a public art piece that he describes as “fairly ambitious.”

This year you’ll see Martin’s submission Love to All the Rebels, a short, upbeat visual collage.

When he’s not busy riding bikes, Martino works in the arts for a Baroque Orchestra called Tafelmusik. He also enjoys still photography. But what is it about bikes that so engages Martin? ” Simple” he says. “Human and machine in harmony. They are blissful things.”

And they’re still rolling in! We’ve gotten nearly 20 submissions today alone. It’s 11:00 at night and the doorbell just rang with yet another.