A Pacific Grove man set off on a bicycle journey with no food or money. He made a movie about it.

People who have struggled are the people willing to help others the most. That’s the lesson local filmmaker Daniel Troia learned during seven months of a journey, studying human connection. It is also the lesson he is now bringing back to the community, showing his 2020 documentary We Are All in This Together locally for the first time.

Born and raised in Pacific Grove, Troia made two documentaries while working as a bartender, the job that offered him flexibility to pursue his other passion – exploring alternative ways to travel. “Being on the bicycle is meditative, very therapeutic,” he says. “You just leave and the story comes to you.” The first movie was based on a bicycle trip, too. Troia decided to ride across Europe, from Rome to Amsterdam, and had an idea to film the experience, which became Two Wheels to Freedom (2016). Just like the journey that ultimately produced the second movie, this one was a solitary trip with a hidden camera ready for unplanned experiences. “When you are by yourself, you experience a lot of personal growth and can reflect on your life better,” Troia says. He crossed the Swiss Alps and then worked on a farm with a local family for a couple of weeks.

He didn’t know he had a movie until he was back home and National Geographic liked his footage enough to use it in an article about the Italian Alps. He put the first documentary together and showed it at Lighthouse 4 Cinema in PG in 2016, the same place that will screen We Are All in This Together on April 9.

Troia knew he wanted to do another journey pretty much immediately after the first trip. During divisive times in America, he decided to bicycle across the nation in “the hope of gaining a better understanding of the human connection,” as he wrote. This time he was better prepared – he invested in a drone camera and read a book on dumpster diving. “Physically I was training for it for a year, because I knew I would push myself harder this time,” he says.

The trip took seven months; he crossed the Sierra Nevada, passed Lake Tahoe, the Nevada desert, crossed the Rockies in Colorado, the Great Plains, and arrived in New York.

When he wasn’t riding, he was sitting on the side of the road holding a sign: “Biking across country, run out of food. Anything helps.” He would tell people afterwards that he was making a documentary, but not before: “The most real moments are the most important, even if that’s not the best footage,” he says. “When you are catching real emotions.”

The movie is full of emotional moments. Standing with the sign filled him with shame, Troia says, and that’s when he understood that more brings us together than separates us. “When I left, I looked like this,” he says, touching his freshly shaven cheeks. “But after seven months on a bike, people no longer would make eye contact with me. But I was trying to stay dedicated because every couple of weeks I would meet someone so kind and beautiful and that would keep me going.” If he was too hungry, he would eat from dumpsters. “It’s unbelievable how much food gets thrown away behind grocery stores,” he says.

The poorer the neighborhood was, the more help he would receive. People who helped him were often those who used to be homeless or people full of grief and heartbreak. He talks about them as passionately as about the beauty of Montana, its mountains so big, rugged, extreme. The worst night was sleeping behind a warehouse in Patterson, New Jersey when he heard a car stopping at his tent at 3am. And the best moment was on the side of the road, when he was sitting without his sign, in pain. A homeless man asked if he was OK and gave him some food.

Upon returning home, Troia stayed in for a month, resting. Then, he started to put the movie together. He was done two weeks before Covid lockdown began, and only now can promote the film.

WE ARE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER 7pm, Saturday, April 9. Lighthouse 4 Cinema, 525 Lighthouse Ave., Pacific Grove. 643-1333. Free. (Gathering For Women will be collecting donations.) www.santarosacinemas.com/lighthouse