‘It’s easier than life on earth’: Meet the Russian climbers who fell in love while scaling the world’s skyscrapers | Documentary Films

She wraps her arm around his and he kisses her hand softly. Watching the film, one might suspect that this relationship is a way of transforming a documentary about forbidden physical activity into a narrative with broader romantic appeal. Seeing them in the flesh, as they embark The Skywalkers At the Tribeca Film Festival, it’s harder to be cynical. Their affection and mutual warmth are palpable.

She is short and muscular, wearing a miniskirt, fluffy black shoes that make her feet look like giant pandas, and a hat with ears that turn her into a cute cat. She moves a lot, smiles and laughs. He has a gentle, more attentive presence, with a sweetness that balances his liveliness.

The contrasts between them emerge as they explain what drew them to rooftops in the first place. Nikolau is the daughter of trapeze artists and grew up in a circus, learning ballet and acrobatics as a child. Her childhood was marked by her mother’s depression after her father abandoned them. “I started looking for who I could become,” she says.

She discovered rooftopping while running away from her mother at an event where she was bored. “I started looking around and saw a staircase going up. I pretended to go to the bathroom and headed up to the roof. It was exciting, but I also had a pang in my heart. I didn’t know if it was because of the height or because my mother would be angry. Later, I decided to overcome my fear. I wanted to have that feeling of being on a roof.”

Beerkus chose the heights because he felt out of place on the ground. “In Russia, some guys would go up on rooftops to get away from adults and drink,” he explains in the film. “I didn’t drink much, but I started exploring. The higher I went, the easier it was to breathe.” When we talk in New York, he adds, “When I was a teenager, there was a point where I was lost in life. I didn’t know who I was, I didn’t fit in. Then I saw a photo from the roof of a building and it interested me. I started moving around and trying smaller buildings, then going higher and higher, and then I joined the rooftop fraternity in Moscow. We started competing with each other.”

In 2014, an article in Rolling stone He spoke of Moscow’s “roofers,” describing them as “a group of incredibly non-acrophobic daredevils who scam and sneak their way to the top of Russia’s tallest buildings.” Instagram and YouTube have made them more than just thrill seekers. Their photos and GoPro videos have made them social media stars, able to attract followers and sponsors. The subculture of extreme urban adventure-seeking is a global phenomenon, but it has been particularly popular in Russia, where, as one roofer explains: “When you’re in the West and you go over a fence, people react nervously… When you do something illegal in Russia, you can do anything, unless you start hitting someone… We have a society that doesn’t care.”

Beerkus has always been a bit different. He made his name by climbing all the Stalin-era buildings with stars on them, amassing a whopping 200,000 followers on Instagram. “In Russia, that was unheard of,” Nikolau laughs. “He was on a God-level. That’s when I noticed him. I had my eye on him.” She was trying to break into the male-dominated rooftop world and had been turned down. “I started flirting with him a bit on Instagram and trying to intercept him on some of the climbs.”

The two finally met when Beerkus asked Nikolau to accompany him on the Goldin Finance climb, an adventure sponsored by a travel agency. He needed to find the most extreme woman on the rooftops – “and the most beautiful,” he adds gallantly – to seal the deal. “His text was very professional,” she says. “But as soon as I read it, I said yes.”

At that time, she was already being followed by a film crew that was making a documentary about dangerous sports in Eastern Europe. The footage shows the couple’s first meeting on a train, where they discuss their adventure. “Sparks were flying, but we didn’t admit it to each other,” Nikolau says today. “But then we went to Hong Kong together. There was a typhoon warning, but we decided to take a chance and Ivan showed me some rooftops. When we got up there, he took my hand and I knew.”

The Skywalkers The film shows her struggling with her doubts about their relationship, but in real life, you can see how invested she is in their partnership. “I knew I could survive on my own, but it’s better with him. I had to accept that situation and choose this path,” she says. Beerkus smiles: “Sometimes I feel like a hostage, but I don’t mind,” he says with a laugh. “But I like to think the film shows that if you stick together as a couple and continue to help each other overcome obstacles, you get to where you want to go. It was a choice to listen to each other, forgive each other’s mistakes, and move forward together.”

BEerkus meticulously plans each climb, scouring the internet for maps and information on the buildings. Safety is always at the forefront of his mind, as is security. He has been arrested several times, and the documentary records their panicked descent from Notre Dame, where they are arrested and put in a cell overnight. Everything is caught on camera, including an argument atop a frighteningly fragile spire, where she moans that there is no point in doing all this if he can’t get better photos of her legs.

In planning their attempt on Merdeka, he calculated the timing – he knew the guards would be watching the World Cup final – and the logistics of each stage of the climb. The fact that things go wrong and they end up hiding for 36 hours adds to the tension, but doesn’t detract from their intent. Nikolau adds creative touches: the acrobatic moves, the fact that he’s wearing black and she’s in red against a background they know will be blue and grey. “I was a support mechanism for this beautiful flying figure.”

Both men consider themselves artists, not just climbers. Many of their friends from the Moscow rooftopping community are now deceased. “It’s hard to talk about it because these are people we’ve known for years,” Nikolau says. “But we feel like we have a slightly different approach. Many of those who died were looking to achieve a specific physical feat, like hanging from one arm or doing parkour-type stuff. We would never do that. We don’t take physical risks for the sake of it. We want to create images that are beautiful and unusual.”

The result is striking: two human figures glued to the sky, the ground far below. In the film, the cameras dip and rise to give a dizzying sensation of falling; in Merdeka, the couple deliberately arranged a shot that plunges into the narrow well to share the compulsive but terrifying sensation of the descent. “It’s a very strange feeling. We learned not to give in to it. You mustn’t look down, you must look forward,” Nikolau explains. “It’s like in ballet, where to do a pirouette, you have to fix your gaze on a fixed point. You have to look at the horizon.”

On the ground, the couple, now 30, have faced adversity. Covid stopped them in their tracks, the war in Ukraine darkened the landscape of their home country. Nikolau was interviewed as part of a raid on people who knew Vladimir Podrezov, the roof painter who painted a star in the colours of the Ukrainian flag on a skyscraper on Moscow’s Kotelnicheskaya Embankment. They now live in Bangkok and plan to move to the United States. They make money by selling photographs of their projects as NFTs.

Since joining Merdeka 18 months ago, they have diversified. Beerkus is a musician, Nikolau is an artist who has also acted in films. But they have no plans to stop their flying activities. “We don’t plan on stopping anytime soon,” says Nikolau. “Maybe when we’re 75.” Beerkus doesn’t sound entirely convinced. But you can tell he relaxes whenever he talks about standing on top of the world. “It’s 100 percent easier than life on the ground,” he says.