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.