Sand Roads

In 2010 best friends Valerio De Simoni, Jamie Kenyon and Kris ‘Ted’ Davant embark on the adventure of a lifetime: a 50,000km quad bike journey across three continents to break a Guinness World Record while fundraising to combat global poverty. Valerio keeps a diary and they carry a video camera, vowing to document everything, no matter what. Starting in Istanbul, they cross Europe, travelling through Italy to Sicily and on to Tunisia, then traverse East Africa to Malawi. Embracing new cultures, making friends in unlikely places and creating memories against everchanging, exquisite landscapes, this is their rite of passage to adulthood, and they are intent on testing their limits. The road obliges, becoming tough and unforgiving, fraught with breakdowns, exhaustion, and personal tensions, until tragedy strikes and changes their lives forever. Now, 16 years later, this Australian/Italian co-produced documentary Sand Roads shares the intimate road trip footage alongside a rediscovered diary and contemporary reflections to tell their heartfelt story of friendship, adventure, loss, and courage.

Gabriele Gianni (born in 1978) is an Italian filmmaker and artist, whose work explores the relationship between technology, memory, and language. He has directed the documentaries A Sense of Wonder, Ecce Robot, About Sol and Notes on Stone. As a screenwriter and director, Lorenzo Conte has created documentaries and fiction films that have been selected for various international festivals. As an independent filmmaker, his work has consistently focused on social issues, and his most notable works include Life Sentence, The War of Jokes, and The Era of Giants.