Netflix launched the official trailer for Skywalkers: A Love Story a documentary film described as part romance, part thriller, following a daredevil couple, Angela Nikolau and Ivan Beerkus as they take their relationship to terrifying new heights in a wild scheme to climb the world’s second highest skyscraper and perform a death-defying stunt on the spire.
Skywalkers: A Love Story is directed by Emmy-winning filmmaker Jeff Zimbalist (a former rooftopper himself).
Release Date
Skywalkers: A Love Story premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival and opens in IMAX theaters for one week only on July 12th, 2024, then on Netflix on July 19th, 2024.
Synopsis
Skywalkers: A Love Story combines over 200 hours of material shot across seven years and six countries, as well as Nikolau and Beerkus’ 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.
“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.”
Reviews
Variety review called Skywalkers: A Love Story ‘a thrilling, vertigo-inducing documentary’, wrote, “What brings “Skywalkers” to cathartic life is that it’s rooted in the dance of two powerful personalities. What draws them together — their impulse to elevate risk into a kind of controlled madness, to turn rooftopping into an art form — is, at the same time, what tears them apart. The very nature of this kind of climbing, which tends to be a criminal activity (trespassing and worse, especially when it’s done in certain Asian countries), is that it’s so fearlessly and recklessly independent. It’s like mountain climbing with an anti-social edge. “Skywalkers” is a movie about balancing on the tips of man-made mountains of steel and glass, but it’s also about trust, desire, dread, and transcendence.”
Official Trailer
Here’s the official trailer for Jeff Zimbalist’s documentary Skywalkers: A Love Story