Dominic Gill: Take a Seat Project

VIMFF Life on the Road
Saturday, February 11, 7:30 pm (doors 6:30 pm)
Denman Cinemas

Tickets $18 online / $20 doors   Buy Tickets Here

The third International Take A Seat Project by Dominic Gill, who now takes his tandem bicycle to Egypt, the heart of the Arab uprising.
Dominic explores the country, its politics and its rich history inviting Egyptian people to take a seat and help him pedal through the heat of summer and understand their hopes for the country's future. In turn, they will experience the rawest of road trips, with no doors or windows protecting them from reality - painful, beautiful and everything in between.
    In January 2011, the people of Egypt rose up, attracted global attention and sparked an era that has become known as the Arab Spring. In the midst of this uprising, Dominic takes his tandem to Tahrir Square, the heart of the revolution, and sets out on a grueling 4,200km journey around the country. For 56 days he traveled across the desert in blistering temperatures of up to 55°C guided by 7 Egyptian companions - the spare backseat of his tandem always stood ready to invite others keen to cycle a leg of the adventure and add their individual spirit to the expedition. The perfect tool, the tandem combines Dominic’s love of adventure with his fascination in the people that surround us, and in Egypt he is able to gage the revolution and its significance in a way that international media never touches upon. Egypt's youth embrace a hope that has not been seen in the last thirty years of military dictatorship. During his journey, Dominic explores this hope, at least while his companions are fresh enough to converse!

Dominici Gill
    Since Dominic was knee-high to a grasshopper he's been running around in the mountains and dreaming of adventure. In 2004 he won a small BBC-sponsored adventure film competition at the Kendal Mountain Film Festival. This got him thinking.
    After flirting briefly with a 'responsible' job as an environmental consultant, he decided to cut his ties with the nine-to-five world completely and embark on a journey down two continents on a tandem bicycle, picking up strangers on the way. He took a video camera and filmed the journey. Three years after setting off, he'd travelled from Alaska to Argentina, made an award-winning documentary and written a book that explored the more human side of the journey.
Now Dominic has set a course into the world of adventure film, not just doing the 'tough-guy' explorer thing, but trying to document what he regards as the most interesting thing in the world: the people that surround us.