In A Motorcycle Saved My Life, the open road presents a point of departure for director lori lozinski to process deep-seated grief. Revisiting the formative experiences that drove her ambition, lozinski examines the influence of her parents in the present light of day. It is in unpacking these recollections at full throttle that the ordering of memory becomes justified. Her motorcycle’s intractable hum disrupts the solitude of Northern Alberta’s vast farmland–a place where childhood was rife with paternal expectations. Connecting to her mother’s youthful spirit, an opportunity emerges to see herself anew. A delicate and personal ode to the complexities of how we sit with our history after loved ones have passed.

ONE-LINER

In A Motorcycle Saved My Life, the open road presents a point of departure for director lori lozinski to process deep-seated grief.

TWO-LINER

In A Motorcycle Saved My Life, the open road presents a point of departure for director lori lozinski to process deep-seated grief. Revisiting the formative experiences that drove her ambition, lozinski examines the influence of her parents in the present light of day.

The title of the film is clearly an oxymoron. How can engaging in such perceived and unforgiving risky behaviour be lifesaving? Grief was a feeling I aggressively avoided most of my life, and when I could no longer run from the immediacy of my parents’ deaths, I was desperate to find a way to exist with such profound pain.  

This film’s narrative intent is to situate the audience on the motorcycle with me. To see, hear and feel what I feel when I’m on the road, riding from my current home in Vancouver, BC, back to the land I cherished as a child, and where some of my family still reside, in Northern Alberta. The motive behind not seeing anyone speaking is to nourish the sense that this could all be in the present, or a memory, or maybe a dream, or maybe it embraces all concepts of time. Often, the flow of riding a motorcycle is like that—an exquisite loose reality.  

It’s that state of mind, and the experiences I’ve had while riding, that empowered me in learning how to live with grief. And how to preserve a connection to my parents. And ultimately, how to love myself.