10 Miles/Hour
1970 · 17m · Canada
Directed by Marcel Carrière
Genres: documentary, sports
Tones: contemplative, tender
Seventy-one cyclists pedal from Montreal toward Vancouver to fund a journey to Expo 70 in Osaka. The cross-country ride tests endurance over thousands of kilometres.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1970 doc about cyclists funding a trip to Osaka sounds like pure earnest boilerplate, but Carrière's refusal to pump it into motivational drivel—just bodies, pavement, and the slow arithmetic of endurance—is quietly radical; it's the anti-sports-doc, which makes it almost interesting.
Carrière positions this within the observational documentary tradition while honoring an earlier lineage of structural cinema—the journey as formal constraint rather than narrative engine—and the result is a measured, formally disciplined record that trusts duration and repetition to do the conceptual work.
The decision to hold on the cyclists' faces and breathing without score or intervention—letting fatigue itself become the aesthetic—transforms what could've been a prosaic fundraiser doc into something genuinely physical and affecting.