Survivor is a short film by director Cam Elkins, the man behind the popular Stories of Bike series that’s essential viewing for all motorcyclists.
The film was created for the world famous Distinguished Gentleman’s Ride – an annual charity motorcycle event that takes place across 505 cities in 90 countries – raising over $3.6M USD (in 2016 alone) for prostate cancer research and men’s mental health programs in partnership with the Movember Foundation.
Survivor is the story of Mark Atkinson, an Australian motorcyclist who tells of his experience with depression in a refreshingly honest way – with no sugar-coating or rose-tinted spectacles.
When men are afflicted with depression they often struggle to talk about it openly, in fear of being seen as weak or unmanly. In the United States men are 3.5 times more likely to die by suicide than women, and the overall rate of suicide has increased increased 24% over the last 15 years.
If you’d like to do your part, you can sign up to join the Distinguished Gentleman’s Ride 2017, and/or donate to other riders. I’ll be taking part this year too, so if you happen to be in Sydney on the 24th of September come over and say hello.
Articles that Ben has written have been covered on CNN, Popular Mechanics, Smithsonian Magazine, Road & Track Magazine, the official Pinterest blog, the official eBay Motors blog, BuzzFeed, Autoweek Magazine, Wired Magazine, Autoblog, Gear Patrol, Jalopnik, The Verge, and many more.
Silodrome was founded by Ben back in 2010, in the years since the site has grown to become a world leader in the alternative and vintage motoring sector, with well over a million monthly readers from around the world and many hundreds of thousands of followers on social media.