60 Day Cycle
2020 · 5m · Canada
Directed by Colin Jones, Darcy Wittenburg
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
A cyclist tours quiet pandemic-era streets as shops sit shuttered and traffic thins. The route ends as the city cautiously begins to reopen.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a bike ride through empty streets—which sounds like the most boring premise imaginable until you realize the film is actually about time collapsing, about how a five-minute loop becomes a meditation on collective trauma masquerading as normalcy. The subversion is quiet, which makes it almost dangerous.
A formally precise essay film that inherits the structural and tonal lineage of the city-symphony tradition while interrogating it through pandemic rupture; the cyclical route becomes both form and argument, and the shuttered storefronts read as palimpsest—the measured editing lets each image accumulate moral weight.
The decision to stay on the bike, to never cut away from the rider's perspective or interrupt with talking heads, is what transforms this from a time-capsule document into something that actually *feels* like confinement—a single persistent POV that doesn't allow escape, which is everything here.