How Much of THE BRIDGE: 90 Miles Apart Actually Happened?

Dossier

The film

THE BRIDGE: 90 miles apart — no dialogue, made entirely with AI

Festival

Higgsfield Global Film Festival 2026

True

APACHE STAR set the Key West–Havana record in 2015; the boat, the distance, the buoy, the cigar and the espresso, the broken drive and the failed navigation, the garland on arrival, the number 50, the two flags on a real racing overall

Invented

Both characters, the meeting eleven years ago, the drawer, the bridge

Characters

Invented. Every character in the film is fictional.

Premiere

Parklichtspiele Buckow, Wriezener Str. 1, 15377 Buckow · 20 September 2026

It is a fair question, and the honest answer is that the film sits on a real record and invents almost everything around it. Here is the line, drawn precisely.

Quiz

True or invented?

Before you read on, test yourself. Eight moments from the film and the story behind it: for each one, decide whether it happened or whether we made it up.

True

What actually happened

The powerboat APACHE STAR set the Key West–Havana record in 2015. The shortest stretch of water between the United States and Cuba is ninety miles, but on 1 August she ran the longer route, from Key West to Havana — around 110 nautical miles — in 90 minutes. The mark she broke had stood since 1958: six hours, twenty-four minutes and forty seconds, set by the American boater Forest Johnson on the longer run from Miami.

Roger Klüh drove. He was fifty years old — the run was one day after his fiftieth birthday.

The boat was not new. She won the world championship at Key West in 1992 and again in 1993, under the name Apache Heritage, as the first canopied sit-down V-bottom race boat anyone had built. Omar Danial designed her and drove her, and at twenty-two became the youngest offshore world champion in history: 94.74 mph over a 147-mile course in 1992, then 88.73 mph through eight-foot breaking seas in 1993.

Then she disappeared, until Roger found her hull in 2011 under a torn tarpaulin in a Miami boatyard and signed for her on 31 January 2012. Over seven thousand hours of restoration followed: the hull gutted and rebuilt around a free-floating titanium floor on spring bearings, twin Mercury Racing bi-turbo engines making 2,700 horsepower, over 115 knots in testing, painted in a single colour made for her — ApacheStar Orange. Roger restored and rebuilt APACHE STAR for a single purpose: the run to Cuba. Cuba was always the only goal.

The part that never makes the brochure: the first permit application was refused. Roger applied in the summer of 2013, received a clear no, lost his appeal in 2014 and applied again on 20 March 2015. The authorisation arrived barely four weeks before the run.

Invented

What we made up

Almost everything else.

There is no woman in Havana. There was no meeting eleven years ago, no photograph kept face-down in a drawer, no ride toward a bridge. Every character in the film is invented.

The film is not a documentary about the crossing. It borrows the distance and asks a different question — not can it be crossed, but what does it cost to wait on either side of it.

The interesting column

The things that look invented and aren't

This one is longer than we expected.

The cigar, the coffee and the buoy. One morning in 2011, at six o'clock, Roger Klüh sat at the southernmost point of the United States in Key West — a Cuban cigar in one hand, an espresso in the other — looking at the buoy that gives the distance to Cuba: ninety miles. That is where the idea was born. “Cuba it is,” he writes in his book Apache Star.

The broken drive and the failed navigation. Halfway across there was a loud bang: the boat pulled hard to the right and the right engine overheated. The crew stopped for a quarter of an hour in heavy seas, hatch open, and then ran on without knowing why. Soon afterwards the navigation system failed, and a small handheld unit carried in a racing overall showed the way instead. When the intercom went too, Roger Klüh unbuckled and steered by his navigator’s hand signals. Moments after the finish the right drive exploded and tore away the steering mount, so the boat could no longer be steered. Only with the boat out of the water did the crew see why: its shaft was cut in half — probably by flotsam, perhaps by a container lost from a freighter.

The garland and the honour. The welcome in the film is not exaggerated. APACHE STAR was towed into Havana harbour, where thousands of people and camera crews were waiting, and the Commodore of the Marina Hemingway hung a handmade garland of roses around Roger Klüh’s neck. In February 2016, at a state reception in Havana, Cuba honoured him with the Order of Sporting Merit (Orden al Mérito Deportivo), presented by the Minister of Sport in the name of President Raúl Castro.

The number 50. The racing overalls in the remembered sequence carry it. It looks like a brand device. It isn't. That number came aboard with the throttleman Richie Powers. He had raced under 50 with Don Johnson; when he later joined Omar Danial in the cockpit of Apache Heritage, he brought the 50 with him. She won both world championships under it, and it stayed on the hull when she became APACHE STAR. She has always been forty-five feet long.

Both countries, on one garment. The motorcycle's two-sided livery — one flank American, one flank Cuban — reads as a concept invented for a film. It isn't that either. Photograph the quay in Havana in 2015 and you find it already there: the Cuban flag and the Stars and Stripes on the driver's olive racing overall, one on each upper arm.

The orange. The base layer at his wrists and collar in those photographs is the same orange that went on the boat, and the same orange in the film.

The bike did not invent that idea. It inherited it.

The other column

The things that look real and aren't

The photograph. A print of a man standing at the Southernmost Point buoy in Key West, creased, taped at one corner, “La Habana – 2015” pencilled on the back. The print was made for the film — the morning it remembers was not. In it, the rider wears the PHANTOM FALCON nappa lamb pilot jacket over the BURNING BATTALION shirt, the same shirt the helper crew wear in the departure scene.

The drawer and the room in Havana. All built. None of it happened.

Why

Why we invented the half we invented

The first version of the film had no second person in it at all. One machine, two countries — so the obvious story was one rider, arriving from both shores and meeting himself in the middle.

It looked spectacular and it did not work, for a reason that has nothing to do with filmmaking.

Two identical men cannot have a reunion. The film needed someone to have been waiting. So the second half of it — the woman, the eleven years, the two objects that get handed back — was invented for the only reason worth inventing anything: the true half could not carry the ending on its own.

The title

Where the bridge comes from

The title is older than the film. Roger Klüh ends his book Apache Star with a single sentence about the crossing:

“A bridge from will to reality had been built.”

— Roger Klüh, Apache Star (2021), translated from the German

The film simply took him at his word.

The line

Where we drew a line on purpose

The crossing happened between two countries with a long and contested history, and we decided early that the film would not have an opinion about it.

So there are no politicians in it, no officials and no uniforms. The flags appear only where they belong in this story — on the machines and on the racing overall. The memory of 2015 follows the departure, the crossing and the arrival in Havana, and it stays with the people. Both shores are photographed with equal care.

The only factual statement in the entire film is its credit line about the powerboat that set the Key West–Havana record in 2015.

Everything else, the audience is welcome to decide for itself.

Questions

Everything else