ALEX COSTA
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The Costa Brothers go to Mauritania

20/6/2025

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Blue Banana reached out to me again in early December to see if I would be interested in joining their next project, they made a collaboration with the famed BMW Cafe Racer brand, Cafe Racer Dreams, and needed a film project for it. I was either going to be involved in just the production side, or also as one of the characters in this short film. They had various options, but I pushed them and eventually decided on having the Costa Brothers as their characters. This was my Christmas gift to my brothers that year, a paid trip with 1970s modified BMWs to Africa.

The initial plan was Chile, but we didn't have the budget, we then though of doing Barcelona - Dakar, but the timings were too long, so we ended up deciding on Mauritania, a country none of us had ever been to but sounded wild and exciting.

Once we settled on Mauritania, the "Apocalypse" concept for the film was decided, which is a Mad Max, end of the world type of scenario. At first it was though it would be more of a documentary on us, the brothers, but it switched to this theme once we realised that Mauritania was the perfect film set for it.

With a shoestring budget, the project came very close to not being shot in Mauritania, a lot of calls, nerves, stress... But with negotiations, we pushed through and eventually got the green light - honestly I don't know how we made it work.

I broke my collarbone  in five pieces riding flat track in late January and had to have a metal plate put in. The project was starting in late March. When the time came along, the doctors told me there was no way I should be doing this trip, but there was no way I was going to miss this.

The plan was to send the bikes on a trailer and two Land Cruisers from Spain to Dakhla in southern Morocco, Victor and Juan drove them. We flew to Dakhla 3 days after they left Spain, we met there and crossed the border together into Mauritania - which took around 9 painfully boring hours. It was Ramadan...

We were caught off guard by a 3 day sand storm, it was strong to say the least... Both my analog cameras died on the first day because of the sand, and the bikes' paint, forks and chassis were also braised. However it did make for an incredible apocalyptic scene, it felt like we were in another world.

We toured around Mauritania, there's not much there apart from sand, old buildings and beatun up cars. Petrol is scarce, we had to bring our own, and the hotels are terrible, we camped out a few days. The people were very friendly though.

Some highlights include an oasis Charlie found on Google Maps, it's not Terjit, we thought it would be dry but when we got there it was absolutely amazing. Ben Amera is also a very special place, one of the largest rocks in the world sitting there in the middle of the desert. The Iron Ore train from Choum to Nouadhibou was wild, we put the bikes on the trailers and set off. The whole journey took about 14 hours, we were the only ones in the train, hiding from station staff, the train split in half in the middle of nowhere (luckly it was repaired in about two hours), the wind was ridiculous and at night it got cold, damp and so windy I did not sleep for a single second. When the train broke down again 40kms from the sea, at 2am, we decided to leave it behind and hitch a ride into town. After a long time waiting for someone to stop, a man finally did.

The bikes themselves were great on road, super well built, but off-road they were trickier, they had the engine power to get us though the dunes and the soft sand which was great (they are BMW R100s after all), but the seating position and suspension were set up for road use. This meant that the ride was very bumpy off-road. All the bikes had issues by the end, two of them didn't start unless we used jump leads with the car, my one lost one of the exhaust pipes and the last two days I could not leave my hand off the throttle if we stopped (otherwise it would die and we had to get the car again), which meant that on the last day it ended up dying because of an overheating problem.

​I could ramble on and on, but I'll leave you with some pictures of the project and here is the final edit.
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