Movie Projects
In 2014 with the uprising of our company and Madeira as a mountain bike destination, mostly focused on the Enduro and adventure type of riding, we decided to invite one of our all time favorite riders of this discipline, the Swiss legend, René Wildhaber. With his great feel for nature, technical riding skills and film production experience, he was the perfect character to show the World the magic of Madeira.
René, alongside the French production company, FastFokus, accepted our invite, taking it as an opportunity to produce a segment of “MTB HEROES” a documentary series that shares the stories of the World´s most iconic mountain bikers and locations. No matter the difficulties felt during the production, where our sweet December brought, rain, wind and cold, René proved to be a force of nature crossing Madeira on his bike proving how epic and beautiful our trails are.
Back in early 2014 we had the pleasure organize a Bike Holiday for the Downhill/Freeride super star, Brendan Fairclough and his close friends. It was a memorable week that left Brendan inspired with Madeira right from the start. With his upcoming film project “DEATHGRIP” soon we started communicating about a possible Madeira segment in the movie. We were blown away with the idea and directly started a two-year project having to join forces with several governmental identities and landowners to be able to build these dream lines for the film.
Brendan had to come to Madeira four times during the production process of scouting, building and twice during filming. Scouting was the easy part as Madeira offers countless epic locations to build trails on good dirt. For the built, Brendan chose the UK professional trail builder Nikki Whiles to handle the eight tones digger as together with our crew we built a 2,5 kilometer line with amazing and massive features high up on a ridge line and down towards a 200 meter cliff over the course of six days. Half a year later the whole crew arrived for filming, having the master of focus, Clay Porter, Film Director alongside many other great professionals of the industry ready for action. The weather persisted bad on top of the ridge pushing us to film another local track in the woods and having to organize a second trip for filming the whole line. The result was outstanding where the riding, cinematography, trails and landscapes became a work of art, passion and originality that we never seen before, making us so proud to have been a part of it all! With so much gold found during the filming of “DEATHGRIP” we ended up having two Madeira segments for the history books.
