A Motorcycle Saved My Life
2022 · 12m · Canada
Directed by lori lozinski
Genres: biography, documentary
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
After suffering a tragic double loss, Vancouver filmmaker lori lozinski finds salvation in motorcycle riding, reflecting on grief and past relationships from the seat of her bike.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone's doing the grief-as-metaphor thing now, and a motorcycle as salvation feels like the kind of soft personal essay that plays it safe—I'd need to see what formal or narrative risk Lozinski actually takes to care.
A meditation on loss that uses the motorcycle as both literal and figurative throughline, situating itself in the personal documentary tradition; the question is whether the film's construction—its editing, voice, visual grammar—achieves the formal sophistication to justify the intimacy it demands.
The specificity here is the bike itself as a protagonist, not just a metaphor—how Lozinski frames the mechanics of riding, the physical repetition and muscle memory, as the actual language of processing grief rather than narrating about it; that's the choice that makes this singular.