The skyscraper-climbing couple defying death
Skywalkers, a jaw-dropping Netflix documentary featuring Angela Nikolau and Ivan Beerkus, follows the "rooftoppers" as they risk their lives for art atop the world's tallest buildings.
A young couple are facing each other in the dawn sunshine. The man moves to lift her up, but she is hesitant.
"Don't worry, I got you," he assures her, as he lifts her above his head, in the pose made famous by the movie Dirty Dancing.
It's an intimate romantic moment, that's now shared with the rest of the world in the new Netflix documentary Skywalkers: A Love Story. What makes viewers' stomachs churn witnessing it though, is that it takes place at the top of a 678.9m-high building, on top of a spire that's barely 1.8m wide. And if Ivan Beerkus drops Angela Nikolau, she'll fall into the hundred-storey abyss below, taking him with her.
The film that tells the story of this Russian pair of "rooftoppers" (the name given to their activity of climbing structures without safety equipment) is full of swooping, lurching moments, where audiences can feel that they too, are in danger of losing their footing, high above the ground. Nikolau and Beerkus are the first "couple" from this scene and arguably now the most famous, especially after they claimed to have (illegally) entered and climbed the spire of the second tallest building in the world in December 2022, the Merdeka 118 tower in Malaysia, and posted footage to prove it.
Skywalkers is partly about the journey to climb that skyscraper, but along the way Nikolau and Beerkus display both visual artistry and seeming insanity in their desire for risk. They scale frost-covered cranes dangling high above a city, take in sunsets and cityscapes from astonishing vantage points few other humans will ever share. They have a credit on the documentary for "extreme cinematography", as much of the drone footage of their climbs belongs to them. (No wonder the first image you'll actually see is a warning that "this film contains extremely dangerous and illegal activities. Do not attempt to imitate.")
The story, co-directed by the US's Jeff Zimbalist and Russian Maria Bukhonina, starts with the couple as teenagers, discovering how they began climbing. "Rooftopping" has been a subculture since the 1990s (Zimbalist says that he did it in the US as a young man) and 30-year-old Ivan Beerkus became involved in the 2010s in Moscow, where there was a thriving scene. (Some of the most relatable moments in the film are where Beerkus's parents are begging him to get a "stable" job.)
Beerkus says in the documentary: "the higher I went, the easier it was to breathe" and tells the BBC that his thrill-seeking is part of his identity. "It gives me inspiration, it gives me motivation to live," he says. "Once I discovered that, it's just been something that's come naturally."
Angela Nikolau is the daughter of circus performers and went to art school. While the rise of Instagram and then TikTok in the 2010s and 2020s gave rooftoppers a potentially lucrative platform for posting videos, she insists their activity is for much more than clicks and fame on social media.
"Rooftopping is my art form," she tells the BBC.
"It motivated me that I have been the first woman doing it, and I was always interested in doing something new in the art space. Every time we set up an image, we develop it as a piece of art. I choose the colours and what I will wear. Ivan chooses where the........
© BBC
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