If you’ve never used the word rooftop as a verb, it’s likely that you’ve not been following Angela Nikolau and Ivan Beerkus, a pair of Moscow daredevils who’ve made a career out of scaling some of the world’s tallest buildings. Their climbs are often technically considered trespassing — and completed with minimal or nonexistent safety precautions in place. But Nikolau and Beerkus aren’t just climbing buddies — they’re also in love. Their shared passion for climbing and each other are at the heart of Skywalkers: A Love Story, a new documentary from co-directors Jeff Zimbalist and Maria Bukhonina.
“There’s a danger to romance,” Zimbalist told Netflix’s Queue. “It crushes us. It breaks our hearts. It breaks our hopes. Here, that danger is material. If the love falls apart, if the trust falls apart, it’s life or death. That felt like such a potent way of taking this amorphous sense that we all have in our romance and externalizing it and making it tangible.”
Skywalkers: A Love Story combines over 200 hours of material shot across seven years and six countries, as well as Nikolau and Beerkus’ own footage of their most heart-pounding ascents. The documentary chronicles the couple as they prepare for their most challenging climb yet: breaking into Malaysia’s Merdeka 118 super-skyscraper (including its 160-meter spire). At times, the film feels like an intimate portrait of trust and teamwork. At other times, it’s a tense, cover-your-eyes thriller that leaves you guessing how a relationship survives this kind of pressure.
“When they get on the spires or cranes, the danger factor is exponentially higher,” Zimbalist said, noting that the film crew (which included cameramen Renato Serrano and Pablo Rojas) never pushed the pair to put themselves in more dangerous situations than they would normally, nor did they incentivize them to push their luck for the sake of the shot. “They know each other and they can read each other’s [body] language, but we had not practiced with them, so having cameras around could be distracting and put them in further danger. Luckily, they’re great photographers. They were able to get amazing coverage when they went up without us to these heights; [it’s] just gorgeous spectacle.”
The film is executive produced by Nick Spicer for XYZ Films and produced by Chris Smith for Library Films as well as Tamir Ardon for XYZ Films.
Watch Skywalkers: A Love Story on Netflix now.
