Workplace romance can be tricky. Just ask Angela Nikolau and Ivan “Vanya” Beerkus, who can be found bickering at the climax of their new documentary, Skywalkers: A Love Story, (premiering July 19 on Netflix). But work looks a bit different for them: the Russian couple are professional “rooftoppers” who have spent dozens of hours climbing all 118 stories of the Merdeka skyscraper in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia—also known as the second-highest building in the world. When they reach the top of Merdeka’s metal spire, which reaches 2,227 feet into the sky, Beerkus will attempt to hoist Nikolau in a Dirty Dancing–style lift—that is, if they agree to go through with it. As Beerkus notes in the film, “This is the craziest shit we’ve ever done.”
That’s saying something, considering that one of the couple’s early dates was spent scaling the Eiffel Tower. They spent another in jail, after being arrested while descending the Notre Dame cathedral. So go the death-defying Nikolau and Beerkus, who partnered with director Jeff Zimbalist and codirector Maria Bukhonina, who also acts as their translator, for a conversation about their free falling love story.
The documentary’s origins date back to the early nineties, when Zimbalist began rooftopping—i.e. making unsecured, often illegal ascents up a tall 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 a lot of the same reasons that Ivan and Angela were; the transcendence, attraction to the unknown, being able to escape the pre-prescribed destinations of the city and find these autonomous places to face my fear and figure out who I wanted to be on my own terms.”
Zimbalist spent years in search of rooftoppers to follow for a doc. He encountered a lot of “daredevils dangling for likes” before he met Nikolau—the first major female rooftopper to burst on the scene, who found the sport after growing up in a traveling circus. “Her influences were Basquiat and Warhol, not the Kardashians,” says Zimbalist. When she introduced him to Beerkus, “they presented their relationship as a competition or a rivalry. But you could sense under the surface that there was a flirtation, a courtship bubbling.” He became intrigued by the parallels between extreme climbing and romantic trust. “So many of the stories we have access to are about morally compromised subjects—about deceit, betrayal, and abandonment,” says Zimbalist. “Our hope is that Skywalkers can encourage all of us to lean in to trusting each other again, especially when it’s the scariest thing to do.”
As they shot the film over six years across six countries, the couple helped capture more than 200 hours of original footage from their climbs. (They got an “extreme cinematography” credit on Skywalkers in return.) But the most daunting scenes they shot were those on the ground. “Yeah, they weren’t afraid of the heights at all,” Zimbalist smiles. “It was just revealing their true selves.”
Nikolau and Beerkus are used to curating their image for social media. In the film, though, they were asked to get real about their fears surrounding falling—both from buildings and for each other. “They taught us how to rooftop, and we taught them how to do feature film—warts-and-all,” says Bukhonina. “Of course, temperatures get high sometimes, and things fly.”