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Meet the Death-Defying Couple Who Fell in Love While Climbing Skyscrapers

Posted on by angelo
Meet the Death-Defying Couple Who Fell in Love While Climbing Skyscrapers

Romantic relationships at work can be tricky. Ask us Angela Nikolau And Ivan “Vania” Beerkuswho are found bickering at the climax of their new documentary, The Skywalkers: A Love Story(premiering July 19 on Netflix). But the job is a little different for them: The Russian couple are professional rooftoppers who have spent dozens of hours scaling the 118 floors of the Merdeka skyscraper in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, also known as the world’s second-tallest building. When they reach the top of Merdeka’s metal spire, which towers 2,200 feet into the sky, Beerkus will attempt to hoist Nikolau up into a Dirty dancing style lift, that is, if they agree to do it. As Beerkus notes in the film, “It’s the craziest thing we’ve ever done.”

That’s saying something, considering that one of the couple’s first dates was spent climbing the Eiffel Tower. They spent another in jail, after being arrested as they descended Notre Dame Cathedral. So it goes for Nikolau and Beerkus, who defied death and teamed up with the co-directors Jeff Zimbalis And Maria Bukhoninawho also serves as their translator, for a conversation about their falling love story.

The documentary’s roots go back to the early ’90s, when Zimbalist began roof-pocketing, which involves climbing unprotected, often illegally, onto a high-rise structure. At the time, the filmmaker didn’t know the practice had a name. “I just called it trespassing,” he says with a laugh. “I was drawn to it for the same reasons that Ivan and Angela were: transcendence, the attraction to the unknown, the ability to escape the predefined destinations of the city and find these autonomous places to confront my fear and discover who I wanted to be on my own terms.”

Zimbalist spent years searching for rooftoppers to follow for a documentary. He met many “daredevils jostling for likes” before meeting Nikolau, the first major female rooftopper to burst onto the scene, who discovered the sport after growing up in a traveling circus. “Her influences were Basquiat and Warhol, not the Kardashians,” Zimbalist says. When she introduced him to Beerkus, “they presented their relationship as a competition or a rivalry. But you could feel beneath the surface that there was a flirtation, a bubbling courtship.” He was intrigued by the parallels between extreme climbing and romantic trust. “So many of the stories we have access to are about morally compromised topics—about deception, betrayal, and abandonment,” Zimbalist says. “We hope that The Skywalkers can encourage us all to start trusting each other again, especially when it’s the scariest thing to do.

Shooting the film over six years in six countries, the couple helped capture more than 200 hours of original footage of their climbs. (They earned an “extreme cinematography” credit on The Skywalkers But the most intimidating scenes they shot were the ones on the ground. “Yeah, they weren’t afraid of heights at all,” Zimbalist smiles. “It just allowed them to reveal their true selves.”

Nikolau and Beerkus are no strangers to social media imagery. In the film, they are asked to talk about their fears of falling, both from buildings and from each other. “They taught us how to make roofs, and we taught them how to make feature films, with all their flaws,” Bukhonina says. “Of course, sometimes temperatures get high and things fly.”

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Courtesy of Netflix