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Girls gotta eat dirt

The approach of the protagonists, three fascinating damsels on two wheels, represents much more than a sport, it shows that we are finally rebelling against something. Although in the awareness that every rebellion is an end in itself and will die with the dissidents themselves, but that’s enough.

“We just like to go fast” may sound like a marketing payoff but in fact it is the sentence that Avra, Clare and Delilah use to introduce themselves. There’s no perfection in the Ripton & Co’s movie. And this is its strength: the art of not taking yourself too seriously even when you are young mountain bike talents, especially when you are young. Everything is dirty, even some camera movements are. The three riders are friends, as well as roommates and travel companions. A female camaraderie capable of making every woman proud of belonging to the fair sex. Three girls riding a bike, always joking. This is “Girls gotta eat dirt”. And yes, they actually gulp down a handful of dirt halfway through the movie. I wonder if the gesture inspired the title or the opposite. I like to believe the first hypothesis.

The endless panorama of Colorado is the setting of the movie, it changes with each shot while remaining true to itself. A square piece of land, nestled in the center of the United States of America, neither too south nor too north, not too far from the east but not entirely in the west. You can smell west, rather. I’ve been to Colorado, it’s a challenge to do it justice with words. There is an arid desert made of sultriness in Colorado, of hot dunes, painted and changing in the day. Then there are tangible cracks, terrible gashes in the red rock, cracks with no apparent end. Local trees live there, green firs that rise over 25 meters, interrupting the drought with emerald green and revealing, among the less dense branches, the snow-capped Rocky Mountains in the back. Water that evolves, from the blue mirrors of slow, dense and metallic rivers, to the blinding reverberation of the deepest snow. From liquid to solid. Even in the steam that dries the American asphalt at sunset, which is darker than the European one.

There are urban agglomerations in the middle of nowhere. Human beings here stand out with intermittent luminous signs and any “stars and stripes” stereotype you can remember. There are also human beings who are isolated, however, the most solitary ones, who approach those western souls, those frontier places full of freedom and hope. That’s what I saw in this short movie, the harshness of wild life in contact with Nature in a nonconformist rhythm, a bit Rock’n Roll and a bit Western at the same time. Heroes (heroines in this case) perpetually sweaty who move in wild and dusty environments. On equally desolate scenarios, but of desolate beauty.

The girls’ dirty tires don’t just face ridges, or the dust on the bottom of the forests or the roughest trails. They not only cross a natural space but instead become a communication bridge between ancient and dissimilar cultures and forms of expression. United by the pursuit of play, of adventure in the mountains as it should always be: thoughtless.

No one, I guess, has been spared the feared existential question: “And you? What will you do when you grow up?” In these images it looks like as if the question had been posed backwards. Ask adults what they would do when they were little, and then see three super girls embody what, after all, is a bit of everyone’s answer.

Their proud skids, sometimes almost contemptuous, are combined with a past in which rebellion was an option taken seriously. Theirs is an unconscious riot, however. This is the true value. This is how real uprisings should be: happy, dirty, oblivious. The movie leaves a fleeting smile, but it is the nostalgia for a courage that never was.

In short, BANFF celebrated its 10th birthday in Italy in the right way. If you missed this year’s stages, on Itaca On Demand you will find the collection of all movies including this cool one in which there’s riding, fun and “dirt eaten”.

*In short, it is advisable to alternate a good book with a good short movie, to always exceed the recommended daily doses, to take close or far or during meals, in case of complications consult a hiking guide. All to be kept within children’s reach.