Mumbai, May 28 (IANS): 'The Long Rider', an award-winning feature documentary by Canadian filmmaker Sean Cisterna, is to have its Indian premiere at the soon-to-start 17th Mumbai International Film Festival on June 2.

The film documents the story of Filipe Masetti Leite, who left his home in Canada and set out on a thrilling 16,000-km journey from Calgary to his parents' home at Espirito Santo do Pinhal in Sao Paulo, Brazil, between 2012 and 2014.

His adventure, inspired by Swiss school teacher Aime Tschiffely's 1925 equestrian journey from Argentina to New York, is the subject of his best-selling book, 'Long Ride Home: Guts and Guns and Grizzlies, 800 Days Through the Americas in a Saddle'.

Subsequently, Filipe went on similar journeys from Brazil to the Patagonia Desert in Argentina and from Alaska to Calgary, the Canadian city where his parents first moved when he was nine.

Talking about his film, Cisterna said in a statement, "We are thrilled to be bringing 'The Long Rider' to Mumbai. We set out to make a film that both exhilarates and inspires audiences, and programmers around the world are responding to the emotional themes in Filipe's incredible and epic story."

The film, which has been developed and put together from over 500 hours of unseen footage, has been screened at the Sunscreen Film Festival in St Petersburg, Florida, where it took home the Best Documentary award, and the Beaufort International Film Festival in Beaufort, South Carolina, where it won the Audience Choice prize.