Introducing the bike-in cinema at Breckenridge International Festival of the Arts

Wouldn’t life be sweeter if every theater had a bike-in screen?

That’s the concept behind Cycle-In Cinema, an evening collaboration between the Breckenridge International Festival of the Arts and Breckenridge Film Festival. It was a perfect fit for a warm-and-lazy Sunday afternoon: Filmgoers biked to The Riverwalk Center in downtown Breck, parked their bikes outside and soaked up more than 2.5 hours of bike-themed cinema.

It wasn’t quite a bike-in cinema — everyone parked at the racks outside — but the spirit was there. The night started with a block of 10 films in the “Wildly Fun Bike Shorts” program. Like the name says, these films were no longer than 2 to barely 10 minutes, but they still managed to cover the gamut of everything that makes biking insanely addictive: trick edits like “No-Handed Bike Moves,” an animated look at two-wheeled machines in “Evolution of the Bicycle” and even whimsy like “Goldilock & the Three Bikes.”

The second program, a seven-film block dubbed “Adventure Shorts,” were less expirimental and more Warren Miller. One of the most impressive, “Darklight” from Sweetgrass Productions, gives mountain bikers the same trippy black-light treatment as the company’s winter film, “Afterflow.” It’s also available for free online — the next-best thing to BIFA’s Cycle-In Cinema.