“James Marsh’s Man On Wire plays like the best heist movie, with Philippe Petit and his co-conspirators plotting for months to pull off the impossible (and the truly terrifying).”

Man On Wire is a documentary about a young Frenchman named Philippe Petit who stepped out on a wire illegally rigged between the World Trade Center, then the world’s tallest buildings.

After six and a half years of dreaming about it and eight months in planning, Petit finally executed his plans in August 1974. With the assistance of a team of accomplices, Petit overcame the numerous challenges involved: bypassing security; smuggling heavy steel cable and rigging equipment into the towers; passing the wire between the two rooftops and anchoring it to withstand the winds and the swaying of the buildings.

All this was done under the cover of night. At 7:15am the following morning, Petit took his first step on the high wire 1,350 feet above the sidewalks of Manhattan pulling off what some dubbed “the artistic crime of the century”.