Sundance 2024 Review – Skywalkers: A Love Story – “thrilling and fascinating.”

A still from Skywalkers: A Love Story by Jeff Zimbalist, an official selection of the U.S. Documentary Competition at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. Courtesy of Sundance Institute.

This film started with a warning from Sundance for people who have a discomfort with heights.  Count me one of those.  Even a particularly long set of stairs can throw me off! Not since 2018’s Oscar-winning documentary Free Solo, has a film made me more sweaty or experience more spine-tingling adrenaline than Skywalkers: A Love Story.  And I was just watching this at home on my TV.  I only imagine a large theatre screen to enhance the intense experience.  First-time feature director, Jeff Zimbalist (with co-director Maria Bukhonina) put up his own warning not to imitate what we see – no danger of that over here!

Skywalkers follows the story of Angela Nikolau and Ivan Beerkus, two young Russians who partake in the extreme (and, should we say, illegal) activity of rooftopping.  This is essentially scaling and climbing things like rooftops, cranes or other tall structures without safety gear.  To most of us, an unthinkable risk, but to this couple it’s where they thrive.

Angela’s parents were circus performers, so she grew up seeing death-defying acts every day.  She herself started taking gymnastics and acrobatics from a young age. But when her father ultimately left and her mother was overcome by depression Angela found herself wondering what her place was in all of it.  She had one rule, inspired by her grandmother, “Never depend on anyone but myself.”  Eventually discovering the world of rooftopping, she brought her gymnast skills to the skies, creating art.

Ivan saw the rooftop as an escape.  As a teen, he would head up there with others who were drinking or smoking, but he found the higher he went, the easier it was to breathe.  So he kept climbing.  He gained social media followers for his amazing images taken atop buildings and towers.  He had so many followers that he got sponsors and was able to travel.  He was in control of his own life.  But then he met Angela, and they started climbing together.  It wasn’t just him he had to worry about anymore.

Shot over the course of six years in six countries, Zimbalist follows this couple as they meet (using footage from a previously made short film), as they climb, as they fall in love, as they fight, and as they try to come back together.  Their relationship is an amazing adventure as they travel the world together, conquering death-defying heights, though not always outrunning the police for their trespassing.  The photographs and drone footage the couple takes are spectacular – views I will certainly never see – and you feel every grip of the hand, every shaky step they have to climb courtesy of their GoPro cameras.

With COVID putting a damper on their travels, the two look for other outlets for their creative energy but nothing seems to work and their relationship suffers.  One wonders whether it’s the rush of the climb itself rather than love keeping them together.  When they try to get back at it, Angela suffers from a panic attack while at a terrifying height.  It doesn’t help that she had learned that most of the people she used to rooftop with back in Russia had died.  It’s like the danger all of a sudden became more real.  But, it doesn’t stop her from wanting their biggest climb yet, something no one had ever done before – a new Malaysian mega skyscraper called Merdeka 118.

The last act of the movie plays just like a heist film, with the pair planning their entry to the highly secure building, still under construction.  It’s thrilling and fascinating.  They procure blueprints, they hire a drone operator to show them a close-up of the spire, and they map out security.  There are twists and turns in their tactics and of course, nothing goes exactly according to plan.  If that isn’t enough, the pair expect to do a difficult acrobatic pose (think the dance lift in Dirty Dancing) once they finally get to the top.  If they get there.

Skywalkers is, even for me, at its best when it is taking us to dizzying heights with Angela and Ivan.  It’s when they are at their most vulnerable, when you see Ivan’s distinct worry for his partner and when you see Angela’s unstoppable determination.  While Zimbalist relies on some voice-over exposition in the beginning that helps us to know our central subjects, it becomes unnecessary later on when this climbing footage portrays everything needed.  “I worry about you so much.  It’s overwhelming,” Ivan says at the top of one building.  Later in their relationship, when Angela feels his worry is limiting her, we watch the two get into a regular couple argument, many storeys above the ground.  It moves the narrative along without explanation.

As the pair continue to new heights, Skywalkers becomes a physical viewing experience.  While Angela doesn’t see their acts as an adrenaline addiction, but as ones of self-growth, I certainly felt the rush of their climbs even from the comfort of my couch.  It’s difficult to imagine anyone climbing this high without any safety gear, and the metaphor for falling in love is clear, if even a little on the nose.

“Our full potential is on the other side of fear,” Angela says in the film.  Perhaps that is true whether you’re walking a ledge hundreds of feet off the ground, moving to a new country, taking the stage for the first time, starting a new job or, yes, even falling in love.  This pair’s climbing, like falling in love, is rooted in distinct trust, knowing that the other will be there to care for you and to catch you.  This is what Zimbalist seems to truly be intending.  Getting over this fear seems to be the biggest obstacle these two face.  It’s similar for many people, even with two feet firmly, and safely, planted on the ground.

Skywalkers: A Love Story premiered at the Sundance Film Festival January 18, 2024.  It continues to have online viewing available through January 28th for those in the U.S.  For more information head to festival.sundance.org