Man on Wire

Quite why anyone would want to wire-walk hundreds of feet above the ground is something that I've never understood. The mere thought makes me feel ill. The subject of this documentary, Philippe Petit, on the other hand has spent his life doing just that. Not content with walking above Notre Dame and the Sydney Harbour Bridge, in the early 1970s he set his sights on the newly-built World Trade Center. A combination of talking heads, reconstruction and actual footage shot by his associates tells the story. Petit's obsession butted against the slightly more rational concerns of his friends (do we really want to be partly responsible for th death of our friend?) although there was only ever going to be one winner. Miraculously 9/11 is never mentioned once. It doesn't need to be. It's there in the mind of every person in the audience, especially during the archive footage of it's construction and an eerie of photograph of Petit on the wire with a plan flying overhead.