DVD, 2012, 76 minutes, 16:9 PAL, film by Karla Lemus & Boris Castro, production: Green Hunter, language: English and German (with subtitles), foldcover.

A group of bicycle aficionados from Hamburg, Sankt Pauli traveled to Los Angeles, to cross the city for 12 days into all cardinal directions. They cruised through the barrios of East L.A., to the beaches of Venice, climbed the Hollywood Hills and discovered a forgotten velodrome in Encino.

They worked as volunteers at the Midnight Mission on Skid Row, where 15,000 people live homeless and as a contrast they face the madness of lethal weapons at the L.A. Gun range in downtown.

The movie is not just showing Los Angeles from an unknown perpective, it also puts up the question how one can cross this ecological and cultural desert. But the group is not alone, because L.A. shaped a remarkable and complex bike community, who daily faces the pressures of modern evolution and overcome the distances and the traffic.

Along the boulevards that are lined by palms trees either in the rich residential areas or in the ganglands of the poor, their bikes became a tool to discover, to challenge and to encounter.

Trailer.

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