View from Above

Just hours before the closing ceremony of the Paris Olympics, a man was spotted climbing the Eiffel Tower. He was heading towards the second floor, where he was stopped and arrested. Back on the ground, as he was led away by the police, wrists handcuffed behind his back, the shirtless man quipped: “Bloody warm, innit.” The French media later identified him as a British climber.

The incident reminded me of Jeff Zimbalist’s latest worldwide release on Netflix, Skywalkers: A Love Story, a vertigo-inducing documentary about an underground urban tribe called ‘rooftoppers’—people who go around scaling tall buildings, without any safety harness or equipment whatsoever. They then post videos and photos on social media. More followers translate into sponsorships from travel companies. Rooftoppers have taken selfie-taking to an elevated new level: it’s not silly vanity but drop-dead serious.

Because I’d seen the film, I knew what the man on the Eiffel Tower was doing. He was not a harmless nutcase seeking attention on the world stage, like a streaker in a cricket match. He was a rooftopper! In fact, in Skywalking there is a moment when Ivan ‘Vanya’ Beerkus, one of the lead protagonists, says that Eiffel is impregnable: “There’s security cameras everywhere, no blind spots, even night vision cameras. I didn’t have a chance.”

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Before I embark on my take on this unusual film, a word about what attracted me to it. One of the few phobias I have is the fear of heights. It’s something that I’ve developed as I’ve grown older. As a little boy I remember coming from Allahabad (which had no tall buildings at the time), to Bombay (which had plenty). I would tag along with my parents wherever they went.

One of the thrills was to stand on the 18th-floor balcony of poet Adil Jussawalla’s flat in Colaba. When I looked down, the yellow and black Premier Padmini taxis appeared as dinky cars. The people looked like ants crisscrossing the streets, under bright yellow sodium lights. It’s something I can’t do now. The last thing I’d do is go bungee jumping. These days my tryst with heights goes to the extent of checking the water level in the overhead tank on the roof of my house, which I try and avoid as much as I can.

In an interview on the Sundance festival website, director Zimbalist (the co-director is Maria Bukhonina), when asked about the “big challenge” he faced while making the film, said: “Vertigo. These roofs are really high and really scary and I’m getting old! Seriously, safety was our number one concern, and we’re relieved to have finished without anyone getting injured (well, severely at least) or arrested (well, the crew at least).”

There is a much-quoted article, which appeared in Rolling Stone back in 2014. It traces the roots of rooftopping to Russia. Moscow roofers are a “loose-knit group of insanely non-acrophobic daredevils who scam and sneak their way to the tops of Russia’s highest buildings”. One of them tells the magazine: “When you are in the West and go over a fence, passersby react nervously… When you do something illegal in Russia, you can do anything unless you start to beat someone up… We have a society that doesn’t care.” That’s true about India too, except that we just don’t have seriously tall buildings.

When I came across Skywalking, I was struck by the subject. While watching it would not exactly help me conquer my fear of heights, it would serve as an introduction to risk-loving folks who have given the phrase ‘scaling great heights’ a literal and concrete spin.

Skywalking follows the lives of Angela Nikolau and Vanya Beerkus—Russian rooftoppers both. The highs of going higher and higher are interspersed with the highs and lows of love. This is no ordinary couple; even their love story is extraordinary. The centrepiece of the film is their quest to climb the 118-storey Merdeka building (678.9m high) in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, the second highest building in the world. Its metal spire reaches 2,227 feet into the sky, or as Angela puts it: “This epic infinity spire towering over Asia.”

Shot over a period of seven years, the film, as the title suggests, operates at two levels: it’s about rooftopping; it’s also a love story. “I thought Vanya was put into my life to teach me to skywalk”, Angela says. “Now I realise that skywalking was put into my life to teach me how to love.” A lot happens in seven years: both embark on their careers separately, at some stage their paths cross. Along the way there are interruptions, like the pandemic and the Ukraine war.

There’s a bunch of things that come together in rooftopping, as practiced by our couple: adventure; sport; travel; art; gymnastics; circus acrobatics; daredevilry; selfie-culture; photography—using drones, selfie-sticks and GoPro cameras; filmmaking; fashion; social media (principally Instagram and TikTok); skulduggery and guerrilla tactics.

In every climb, there is the clear and present danger of death—at one point early on in the film, the VO of a news clip informs the viewer that “dozens of Russian rooftoppers have died”. Even if you don’t fall to your death, there is a very high chance of being arrested and thrown into jail for years for trespassing, especially in China and South-East Asian countries. And that’s exactly where the couple goes: Tianjin, Chongqing and Shenzhen in China; Pattaya and Bangkok in Thailand; and Hong Kong.

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How does one enter a building illegally? The biggest hack is obviously the choice of timing: The Merdeka climb is done while the football World Cup final is on, when the guards are distracted.

The entire operation is like planning a heist. It is a heist. The couple let the viewer in on their trade secrets: “Always feed the security dogs. Use your skirt to cover security cams. Higher floors offer more entrances. Parking garages always connect to the skyscrapers above them. Staff elevators usually don’t have security cams. Air shafts lead to machine rooms, machine rooms lead to rooftops. On residential sites, look like you belong. Everyone stops you on the way in; no one stops you on the way out. Never stay on top for more than fifteen minutes, a lesson we learnt the hard way.”

In Paris, they got caught and spent a night in jail. Angela says: “We are not terrorists, we are artists who like photographing the city from up high.” One has to be an expert in picking locks, even as Vanya explains that they always carry replacement padlocks—“We are not vandals, though technically we are criminals.”

The entire operation is like planning a heist. It is a heist. The couple let the viewer in on their trade secrets: “Always feed the security dogs. Use your skirt to cover security cams. Higher floors offer more entrances. Parking garages always connect to the skyscrapers above them. Staff elevators usually don’t have security cams. Air shafts lead to machine rooms, machine rooms lead to rooftops. On residential sites, look like you belong. Everyone stops you on the way in; no one stops you on the way out. Never stay on top for more than fifteen minutes, a lesson we learnt the hard way.”

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Angela’s parents were circus performers, who separated after her father left her mother for someone else. Early in her childhood she took dancing and acrobatic lessons: “I wanted to feel what they were feeling. In the circus they say that our full potential is on the other side of fear. But the fear never really went away. I just got better and better at facing it.”

Because she is a trained competitive gymnast, she has “a fine sense of balance”, which bears her in good stead when she’s striking poses and performing atop the pinnacle. Like when they strike the iconic Dirty Dancing pose atop Merdeka’s spire that is exactly 1.3m wide.

Vanya made a name for himself climbing Stalin-era buildings. When Angela first met Vanya—the most followed rooftopper in all of Russia—she realised that while he “was more tactically advanced, I had the creative touch.” The two then joined forces, and, eventually, hearts.

She brings in the performance element—pulling off circus acts on rooftops as the city swims below. She has her take on male and female rooftoppers. Some of those who plunged to their deaths were trying stunts like hanging from the top of a frost-covered crane with one hand.  Angela looks at it differently: “This isn’t an adrenaline addiction; it’s a commitment to self-growth. A woman is not strong like a man. She’s strong in her own way. My strength is in my femininity.” Together, the couple produce magnificent artworks that are a blend of beauty, brains and brawn, and which they sell as NFTs.

In an interview to the BBC, Vanya elaborates further: “Rooftopping is my art form. It motivated me that I was the first woman doing it, and I was always interested in doing something new in the art space. Every time we set up an image, we develop it as a piece of art. I choose the colours and what I will wear. Ivan chooses where the drones will fly and how the image will be shot. We perform a painting in the air every time we do it.”

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Apart from this being their chosen vocation—how they earn a living—rooftopping is also Angela’s way of dealing with mortality. Angela says of her parents who have quit the circus: “No one will remember them when they are gone. I refuse to return to Moscow to have a plain boring life.” She wants to be remembered.

It’s not that climbing is a breeze for the couple. They get jittery, they freeze with fear, they have arguments, and they bicker even as they climb, rung by rung. The viewer freezes along with them. Angela asks Vanya to step back a little: “When he’s overprotective, he holds me back.” At one point in the Merdeka climb, she tells him: “You’re getting on my nerves.” While the ambition is lofty, the arguments are quintessential couple arguments.

Apart from the stomach-churning footage and breathtaking shots, one marvels at the madness of the enterprise. One false step and you fall into the abyss. Many do. In the cutting-edge confluence of art, fashion, sport and social media fame, rooftopping, as an activity, redefines all four.

It’s a sport, but not something your parents can introduce you to as a child. There are no ‘rooftopping dads’, like ‘tennis dads’. The following on social media are career-enabling, not just an ego massage. It’s fashion, but not on the ramp. It’s art, but not in a gallery space. The Merdeka climb was screened at Times Square in New York, “the biggest art gallery in the world,” as Angela puts it.

Let me end with a passage of dialogue from Wim Wenders’ acclaimed film, Paris, Texas. Two brothers meet high up on scaffolding, as one of them paints a hoarding. The hoarding painter says to his brother: “Thought you were afraid of heights.” The brother says: “No, I’m not afraid of heights, I’m afraid of falling.” The painter responds: “Oh, yeah? Just don’t look down.” The brother says: “No. Too bad things don’t look the same on the ground.” The painter asks: “What do you mean?” The brother says: “Well, things are clearer up here.”

It’s this very clarity that career rooftoppers like Angela and Vanya are after. And beauty too. They have seen views that the rest of humanity hasn’t. They’ve painstakingly climbed up there with their bare hands, centimetre by centimetre, inch by inch. They’ve slipped, but held on somehow, bound by a transcendental faith in each other. That’s where they belong, right on top of the world. As Vanya told the Guardian: “It’s 100 percent easier than life on the ground.”

About The Author

Palash Krishna Mehrotra

The writer is the author of The Butterfly Generation: A Personal Journey into the Passions and Follies of India’s Technicolor Youth, and the editor of House Spirit: Drinking in India