Bike for Bread | 26:08
Claude Marthaler, Raphaël Jochaud – France
Plays in the Travel Shorts program Sunday at 7pm
In the beginning of the world was the Nile, and then came bread and cycling. Over a solid half-century, Cairo has invented an unusual means of delivering bread. As if they were tightrope walkers, the city’s cyclists soar like shooting stars, zooming up one-way streets against endless lines of cars, slipping between the rows of chairs of a café, and disappearing into a bazaar. One hand serves to balance a wooden rack on their heads, bearing hundreds of rounds of bread, and the other rests on the handlebar.
The future of these figures, so familiar in Cairo, remains nonetheless as precarious as that of the Sphinx. Cyclonaut, Claude Marthaler, went there in person to tell the life story of one of Cairo’s bread deliverymen.