Women Don’t Cycle is a 2022 documentary by my colleague and Slowby co-founder Manon Brulard. It is a film about what it means to be a woman cycling in different countries around the world.

The documentary was shot during an eleven-month bicycle touring trip from Brussels to Tokio, with Slowby’s other co-founder Dries (for more about their trip, see Road to the Rising Sun).

I was not involved in Manon & Dries’ trip or the making of this documentary, but I did build a video-on-demand streaming service to distribute the documentary online.

Dries had originally made a landing page for the documentary in plain HTML, using the Story template from HTML5 Up, to promote it for screening requests.

After 120 exclusive screenings in venues globally, we decided that it was time to share the documentary with the internet at large. For this occasion, I made major adjustments to the website:

• I kept the same template, but fueled it with the Astro static-site generation engine to simplify HTML templating in three languages.
• I wrapped it with the Git-based Tina CMS to ease the management of screening event information, which is updated relatively often. It was previously managed by copy-pasting a HTML node in three separate language HTML files.
• I leveraged Supabase, Stripe, Bunny CDN Stream and Svelte islands in Astro to create a video-on-demand streaming service for the documentary with full creative control and minimal overhead in terms of platform costs.
• To show reviews on the site without our manual intervention, I leveraged a low-code solution. Tally forms submissions sync to a Notion database, which in turn feeds into Astro’s static site generation via the Notion API.