News

55 minutes

Darlington Media Group

Produced and directed by Richard Grassick and Beatrix Wupperman

Beauty and the Bike was created by a German-British film-making couple and evolved from the filmmakers’ observation that German girls ride bikes but British girls don’t. They wondered why, and what would happen if girls from the two cities met. The result is a mix of social experiment, coming-of-age story and political manifesto.

Grassick and Wupperman gather together a group of girls in Darlington and ask them what it would take to get them to ride bikes. Through interviews, we learn that the girls’ only experience of bikes is tough boys on BMXs and lycra-wearers on racing bikes. Since the days of their pink bikes with stabilizers (training wheels), the girls haven’t seen any bikes in Darlington that they can relate to.

When the girls are given attractive Dutch bikes to ride, things start to get interesting as they make discoveries like “your feet hurt less in high heels when you cycle than when you walk.”

Nonetheless, the girls are painfully self-conscious as they ride their new bikes to school for the first time – aware of the eyes of both their schoolmates and the camera.

But when the Darlington girls visit Bremen, they’re amazed by the cycle paths and by the car drivers who stop for them. After their trip, the conversations about shoes are interspersed with observations on cycling infrastructure and a second answer to the question of why girls don’t cycle starts to emerge. As the film bluntly puts it, “it’s the infrastructure, stupid.”

Interviews in Darlington and Bremen expose the profound effect that political decisions have on how young people get around. On a busy street in Bremen, a politician states that it would be too dangerous to have cyclists ride with car traffic there. The Bremen solution? Create a separated cycle path.

In Darlington, a benignly supportive politician recommends that cyclists “take quieter roads until they get used to riding again,” at which point, it’s to be assumed, they’ll be ready for the busy roads.

Near the end of the film, the girls demonstrate growing political awareness (and much increased self confidence) when they cycle into a public meeting dressed to the nines to tell local political leaders, “we have the lovely girls on the lovely bikes. Now all we need are the lovely cycle paths.”

Beauty and the Bike leaves you wondering how many other girls would cycle if the conditions were created to make it possible. The film should be seen in city halls across North America.

You can order the DVD, watch an 8-minute short version of the film or find out more about the Beauty and the Bike project at: bikebeauty.org. Bremen has a cycling mode share of 25 percent. Darlington’s is approximately three percent.