Documentary shows life in the fast lane

The World's Fastest Indian isn't the only film about a New Zealand motorcyclist roaring on to our screens. The documentary Love, Speed & Loss, about Kiwi motorbike legend Kim Newcombe, is coming to cinemas in a month or so after screening at the International Film Festival.

A forgotten hero, Newcombe came second in the 1973 World 500 Grand Prix Championship, on a bike - a Konig - he helped build himself and which used a motor adapted from a boat engine.

His story immediately struck producer Richard Driver, a racing enthusiast, and film-maker Justin Pemberton for its "Titanic-ness", a tale not so much about a star whose life was cut short in a tragic crash, but a love story told through the eyes of his widow, Janeen.

The couple arrived in Germany in 1969, and she travelled with him throughout Europe, filming their free-spirited nomadic lifestyle as they trekked from race to race. But for years after his death, Janeen's footage sat idly at home.

"She's always wanted to tell the story but she's never known how to," says Pemberton, who spent a year making the film.

"At the start it was just too painful, then she decided she'd try and forget about it and get on with her life. When the cancer arrived, she thought, 'I have to get this out now or I'll die with it.' Even their son Mark says there are a lot of things about his father he doesn't know."

Despite its sense of foreboding, the documentary is a window into the free-spirited summer lifestyle of the European racing scene in the 70s, and features young, groovy couples living it up in their short shorts and huge sunglasses.

Newcombe shies away from the camera and the voice tapes Janeen would send home, and appears in the film almost as a phantom, an unassuming, practical man completely absorbed by his work. After each race he would spend hours, sometimes entire nights, working on his engine. Newcombe's mystique is amplified by his quietness, and by Janeen's gregarious nature.

"He's a bit of a James Dean, Marilyn Monroe character in the sense that he's almost mythical," says Pemberton. "You can't really bring him to life because there were no interviews. Nobody had anything bad to say. Those people who die young and successful are remembered in that heroic way."

Still, Pemberton was determined to do justice to his story by portraying him warts and all, revealing the couple's troubled childhoods and the hardship Janeen faced after his death, cutting between her grainy Super 8 footage and recent interviews with Janeen and Newcombe's various friends and associates, and inserting audio over the silent footage.

He also went back to Berlin and shot racetrack footage and replicas of bikes on a Super 8 camera to make it look like Janeen's. This might seem manipulative, but Pemberton says the result makes the film look more real than if he hadn't.

Anika Moa and Jason Smith provide the soundtrack.

"It's a lifespan story and it's so rare in documentaries," he says. "There are some pretty universal things in there as well, not just the big ones of love and death but relationships with your parents. It's the stuff of feature films, really. It's just such an epic story."

* Love, Speed & Loss is due to screen at Rialto cinemas in Dunedin, Christchurch and Wellington from November 10 and Rialto, Auckland in December.