For Liz Canning, bicycles were a way of life. The Fairfax-based film editor once used her bike for everything, even commuting to the city, but when she had twins in 2008, her bike was replaced by a minivan. “I suddenly couldn’t ride my bike, and I hadn’t ever been a driver,” says Canning.

Feeling trapped by her dependence on cars and fossil fuels, Canning looked into family bikes and discovered the cargo bike.

First introduced in Denmark and now popular in Europe and elsewhere, cargo bikes are designed to transport heavy loads with either front or back units attached to the bike. Additionally, electric assist bikes help riders carry the load up hills or long distances.

“I discovered people all over not only using cargo bikes, but getting really excited about it,” Canning says. After ordering a cargo bike from a shop located in Portland, Ore., in 2011, her life changed. “Suddenly, getting around was actually fun,” she says. “I thought, this is really accessible, this could go mainstream.”

Canning took on the cargo bike as the subject of her debut documentary and crowdsourced the project to gather footage from those around the world who use cargo bikes in their life.

After several years of compiling the film, Canning released Motherload this past April, and the film recently screened at the Smith Rafael Film Center. It’s also set to screen at several film festivals later this year, and anyone can host a screening by purchasing a community screening package.

In the film, Canning introduces audiences to characters like Buffalo, N.Y.-based couple Brent Patterson and Stacy Bisker (pictured), who were struggling to pay off student loans and medical bills when they traded in their car for a cargo bike to save money. The couple were surprised by the joy they felt performing everyday tasks like grocery shopping, simply due to riding the bike.

Another figure in the film is Portland-based, mother-of-six Emily Finch, who peddled a 500-pound bike with six kids in tow and became a minor celebrity in town. That celebrity-status came with backlash, and the film looks into the way American stigmas continue to push back against bikes in favor of cars.

Motherload also turns the clock back to look at the role bicycles historically played as tools for social revolution. Bikes have empowered the poor for over a hundred years and were used as tools to network and protest during movements—like women’s suffrage—of the early 20th century.

Today, bikes continue to offer a way to disconnect from the financial strain of automobiles and to empower a cultural shift away from pollution and its effects on climate change.

“The main thing that inspired me to make this film and go about it the way that I did, is that once people give this lifestyle a try, they are overwhelmed by what it does for their life,” Canning says. “What they discover in their community, what they discover about their need to move their body, to feel the wind in their hair and the sun on their face—it’s really transformational.”

‘Motherload’ is playing in limited release. Host a screening by signing up at motherloadmovie.com.

Maiden, a documentary about the first all-female yacht crew to participate in the Whitbread Race in 1989-90, dwells upon the emotional state of the captain. The camera stays with the Maiden’s captain, Tracy Edwards, now 56. The tears come, as she tries to compose herself. She apologizes, tells the director she really promised herself she wouldn’t break down. This movie tries to make you cry.

And, it often succeeds.

The race is a serious undertaking: 167 days long and 30,000 nautical miles, in 6 stages. It begins with a stretch from England to the coast of Uruguay. Then, the racing yachts round the Cape of Good Hope, skirt the icebergs off Antarctica’s coast—taking advantage of the speed granted by the gales of the “Roaring Forties”—and arrive in Freemantle, Western Australia. From there, they sail to New Zealand. Then around Cape Horn, then north to Ft. Lauderdale and back to England.

The vastness of this trip is equal to the vast condescension Edwards and her team faced. In her early days as a yachtsperson, Edwards found neither a position on a crew, nor support for her dream of sailing on her own. “Girls are for when you get into port,” one yachtsman assured her. The rank sexism even included the media covering the race. (The Guardian’s Bob Fisher referred to the Maiden, in print, as “a tin full of tarts.”)

It’s as if the boating community was 30 years behind the times, even in 1989. Count the number of times you hear Edwards told to “smile” by a photographer. See her referred to as “a slip of a girl” by her contemporaries. Witness the number of times someone talks to her like they want to pat her on her little head. One marvels at the legions of men out there who really want to grind a proud woman down.

There’s a particularly affecting moment during the Maiden’s poor performance in the New Zealand-to-Florida leg (caused by a leak in the boat off the coast of Argentina—serious enough that the Maiden had an RAF rescue plane on standby from the Falklands). To deflect attention from their late arrival, the ladies decided to sail into harbor in Florida wearing skimpy bathing suits, a gesture Edwards has regretted for 30 years.

Director Alex Holmes’ film is very clear on what Edwards was trying to prove and how hard she worked to prove it. Home movies and primitive video demonstrate the vastness and loneliness of the sea. The trip was an exercise in sleep deprivation, with four hours on watch, four hours off. And, as Edwards says repeatedly, “The ocean is always trying to kill you. It never takes a break.”

The problem with Maiden is something handled more deftly in The Raft, a documentary about a transatlantic voyage with a mostly female crew which was conducted as a peculiar psychological experiment. In Maiden, we don’t get a sense of the friction onboard, nor the technical requirements of such a voyage, nor of the boat itself. The focus is on Edwards (a life coach these days). The loss of her father ended an idyllic British childhood. Her mother married again, to a vicious drunk. The young girl dropped out of school, ran away to Greece and drifted into the sailor’s life. We see what she was trying to overcome.

What we don’t have are good anecdotes about what it takes to be a sea cook—we only get occasional references, such as a passing note about smelling land after weeks at sea, and diplomatically understated English intimations of the strife aboard the boat. We don’t even learn if a subsequent team of women ever tried the Whitbread race. Stirring as Maiden is, it lacks all the Melvilleian tidbits that make for a detailed picture of a sea voyage.

‘Maiden’ is playing in limited release.

Q: I’m a 27-year-old guy. I’m short and honestly, I’m not that physically attractive. I’m nice, funny and on the fast track in my career. My friends say bluntly that the more money I make, the more women will be interested in me. I’m sure that’s true, but I’m interested in falling in love, not just finding a gold digger. Advice?—Ambitious

A: It would be nice if there were an easy way to identify the gold diggers—like if they showed up for dates carrying a giant golden shovel instead of a handbag they got on sale at Marshalls.

The thing is, a man’s earning power has an effect on kind, loving, generous women, too, to the point that Captain America hunko Chris Evans would likely see a major dive in his sex appeal if he were more, um, Captain Coat Hanger—earning just enough to sleep on a futon in his friend’s walk-in closet.

Guys sneer that women are shallow and terrible for caring about how much money men have, while many men would be just fine with dating a starving artist—a seriously hot starving artist, that is.

There’s some history—evolutionary history—that explains the looks-versus-income difference in the sexes’ mating priorities. Ancestral women could get stuck with some bigtime costs from having sex: possibly going around pregnant for 9 months (with all the fun of digging for edible roots in between hurling from morning sickness) and then having a kid to drag around and feed. Ancestral men, however, could choose to put way less into the reproducing thing—just dispensing with a teaspoonful of sperm and maybe a parting grunt or two.

Men, in turn, evolved to prioritize hotness when seeking mates—features like youth and an hourglass figure that suggest a particular lady would be a healthy, fertile candidate for passing on their genes. And, while partner-seeking ladies of course appreciate a nice view, biologists Guanlin Wang and John Speakman write that women evolved to be more “sensitive to resources that can be invested (in) themselves and their offspring”—as in whether a particular dude could bring home the bison or whatever.

Wang, Speakman and their colleagues explored the impact of “resources”—that is, a person’s economic status—on their physical appeal to the opposite sex. They showed research participants in China, the U.S., the U.K. and Lithuania a stack of cards with images of silhouetted bodies of the opposite sex with varying levels of attractiveness and had them rank the images from most attractive to least attractive. (The researchers converted the rankings to a scale of 1 to 9.)

Next, the researchers randomly assigned salary numbers to the body pix. They brought participants back—at least a week later—and again had them rate the attractiveness of the figures, but this time given the salary paired with each bod.

Upon tabulating their results, they found a major sex difference in how “responsive” the attractiveness ratings were to an increase in salary. If a man’s salary increases by a factor of 10—if his salary becomes 10 times greater—he goes up about 2 points (1.92 on average) on the 1-to-9 attractiveness scale. So, for example, a salary of $50,000 x 10—$500,000—gets a guy 2 points higher in hotness.

Meanwhile, in bummerific news for female honchos, for a woman to achieve that two-point hottitude bump, her salary needs to be multiplied by 10,000. In other words, a woman making $50K needs to make $500 million to be hotter in a man’s eyes. (No problem…right, ladies? Just get yourself promoted from legal secretary to international drug lord.)

The researchers note that because men are “largely insensitive to cues indicating resources” in women, women have to make themselves “physically more attractive” to improve their mating prospects. Men, however, “can offset poor physical attractiveness, or further enhance existing good looks, by demonstrating their large levels of resources.”

This does draw the gold diggers, but again, a woman doesn’t have to be a gold digger to be attracted to a man with money. To protect yourself from those who only care about the money, look for “inner beauty,” or what everybody’s grandpa calls “character.”