On a noisy Kuala Lumpur night in December 2022, when the bars were crammed with football fans glued to the World Cup final, two Russian scamps had a plan. Ivan Beerkus, 28, and Angela Nikolau, 29, two adventurous Muscovites, decided they would break into the city’s almost completed 118-storey Merdeka tower, the second highest building in the world. The pair would risk arrest and a lengthy prison sentence by climbing the stairs, breaking out through the observation deck at 566m and scaling, unaided, the last 133m to the tip of the spire. There, without ropes or safety harnesses, they would flirt with instant death by daring to replicate, in front of their own swirling drone camera, the climactic lift from Dirty Dancing. Obviously.
It sounds ridiculous, absurd even, but the Merdeka tower “heist” is thrillingly real, captured on high-definition video, and serves as a climax to the propulsive new documentary Skywalkers: A Love Story. The film, a mash-up of Free Solo and Man on Wire, is a festival winner that was snapped up by Netflix for a reported $15 million, and introduces the world to Beerkus, Nikolau and their lethally dangerous art of “rooftopping” — illegally climbing tall buildings and man-made superstructures, posing for selfies at the top and, inevitably, posting the photographic results on social media. The movie is also a six-year labour of love from the director Jeff Zimbalist, a former Boston-based rooftopper turned documentary-maker who began filming Nikolau and Beerkus in 2015.
“Back then I had heard that they were rivals and competitors,” says Zimbalist, 45, still excitable about the project today, over coffee in a London hotel. “But when I met them, in Moscow, it was clear to me that there was a relationship, a courtship, there. And that’s when I thought: this film is obviously a love story, but one that’s set on top of the world.”
Zimbalist began charting the lives of his two subjects with the aid of a Moscow based co-director, Maria Bukhonina. He was keen from the start, he says, to balance moments of gobsmacking derring-do (our duo are seen scaling cranes, spires and monuments in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Macao and Paris) with tender scenes of the romantic relationship that was unfolding before him.
Nikolau says it was the intimate scenes that were most unnerving at first. “It was a little bit strange, kissing when the camera was there,” she says when we speak over Zoom after the film’s New York premiere. “But when it came to the rooftopping it made no difference.”
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In between the climbs and snogs Zimbalist shot 11 hours of interviews with his protagonists, delving into their backstories and finding deep-seated psychological motivations behind their outlaw lives. Nikolau is the child of circus performers and trapeze artists who separated when she was young, and seemingly left an acrobat-shaped hole in her world that only rooftopping could fill. Beerkus, too, claims that covertly climbing towards the skies is the only thing that makes his empty, alienated but otherwise middle-class Moscow existence worthwhile. “The higher I go, the easier it is to breathe,” he says in the film.
Zimbalist says that, unlike Free Solo or Man on Wire, he is not trying to present Nikolau and Beerkus as exceptional humans with unique gifts. He wants to show, instead, that they’re just as normal and emotionally fragile as everyone else. “So many extreme sports documentaries do that thing where they say [he speaks in a deep trailer-man voice], ‘This person has made peace with dying!’ Well, our subjects haven’t. They don’t want to die. They’re genuinely afraid of dying. And we really wanted to embrace how they are actually like the rest of us in terms of fear being a limiting factor, and how much they listened to that fear.”
And yet surely the very fact that this project exists, or that Zimbalist wanted to film it, raises huge ethical questions. Are we not, as an audience, waiting for Nikolau and Beerkus to slip to their deaths at any moment? The film includes a sequence on the multiple fatalities associated with rooftopping, making the possibility of our protagonists’ mortality seem part of the eerie thrill. And, most important, does the presence of Zimbalist’s camera make the climbs more dangerous (the “show-off” factor) and the potential for tragedy more likely?
“Oh, we wrestled with that from day one, and throughout the entire process,” Zimbalist says, suddenly sombre. He explains that one of the production’s first acts was to establish a set of safety protocols that were approved by the climbers’ families. This included Zimbalist’s agreement not to shoot the final and most dangerous section of any climb; this footage was covered instead by Beerkus’s admirable drone camerawork. Plus, Zimbalist says, at any point in the ascents, “if it was getting hairy, we would back off. We were in fact frequently saying, ‘That looks a little bit too reckless. The legal team is going to freak out.’ And, ethically, we found ourselves thinking, ‘How can we live with ourselves if something was to happen?’”
“We didn’t do anything special for the camera,” Nikolau confirms. “The only difference was the extra material we gave them, and all the behind-the-scenes footage.”
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Elsewhere the film’s six-year time frame covers Covid (no climbing, alas) and the invasion of Ukraine, although the movie has been criticised for not delving deeply enough into Nikolau and Beerkus’s stance on the war. Zimbalist rejects those criticisms, noting that his subjects are simply not “safe” enough to make public statements about Putin. They “had the police show up at their door because someone they were acquainted with, another rooftopper, made a political statement. And they got questioned, and it scared them. I don’t think they feel free from danger, regardless of how apolitical they’ve been in the past. They feel they fit into a certain [antiestablishment] type — and that alone endangers them.”
Questions too have been raised about the social media aspect of rooftopping, and the possibility that Beerkus and Nikolau are blindly risking their lives simply for the extra likes, followers and financial rewards that flow from their sizeable Instagram accounts. Not so, Zimbalist says. “Angela has grown up in the circus,” he says. “Her idol is [the artist] Jean-Michel Basquiat, not [the social media influencer] Jake Paul. And she really is aspiring to do something elevated here.”
Zimbalist finished shooting after the Merdeka climb in 2022, and spent a year editing in preparation for the movie’s Sundance Film Festival premiere earlier this year. The finished product is a delicate and moving portrait of a relationship under pressure, and also includes some of the most vertigo-inducing sequences ever captured on film. Anyone who is not entirely comfortable with the sight of two carefree millennials in trainers wobbling madly on construction ladders hundreds of metres above busy cityscapes might want to think twice. The premiere, Zimbalist recalls, was wild. “People were squirming,” he says. “They covered their eyes, and talked back to the screen. It was more like a sporting event than a movie.”
What next? Zimbalist is already working with Bukhonina on a follow-up rooftopping movie, and will release a literary documentary, How to Come Alive with Norman Mailer, later this year. As for his rooftopping stars, can they now parlay the attention generated by the film into new careers that are less dangerous and more, well, earthbound? Apparently no.
“For us it’s a vocation,” Nikolau says. “There are more roofs that we want to do, and we have more plans, but we cannot tell you because it has to be a secret before it happens.” She laughs and then, deadpan, adds: “We live to do this every day. It pushes us further because we enjoy it. We don’t go out there to risk our lives; we go out there to create art and make memorable moments. And, yes, people keep asking us when will we quit. But the answer is that we just wake up every day and see how we feel. And we’ll quit when we feel that we can’t do it any more. That hasn’t happened yet.”
Skywalkers: A Love Story is in cinemas from July 12, and on Netflix from July 19
