Higher Love

For many, this was their first introduction to Angela and Ivan. In reality, they have spent the best part of a decade building towards a moment that, strangely enough, felt entirely in keeping with everything that came before it.

Both in their early thirties and born in Moscow, Angela and Ivan are among the world’s best-known rooftoppers, people who scale skyscrapers and other towering structures, often without permission or safety equipment. But calling them climbers is a little like calling a filmmaker a camera operator. The pair have never been interested in climbing for climbing’s sake, for them, the ascent is only one part of the work. The drone shots, the styling, the choreography, the snogging on the edge of a skyscraper. That’s the art. The rooftop or the ledge is the stage.

By the time he contacted Angela in 2016, he had already established himself within Russia’s urban climbing scene, gaining international attention for scaling some of the tallest buildings in the world. Looking for someone to join him on a sponsored climb in China, he reached out to Angela because, in his words, he wanted “the most extreme female rooftopper and the most beautiful one.”

Against all odds, it worked.

That balance hasn’t always been easy. The documentary doesn’t shy away from showing disagreements. Ivan’s instinct to protect Angela occasionally drifts into control. Angela, fiercely independent and determined to pursue projects beyond their shared work, refuses to become simply one half of a partnership. Strip away the skyscrapers and they’re navigating the same questions as every long-term couple. How much space do you give each other? How much do you sacrifice for someone else’s dream? Where does compromise end and losing yourself begin? The difference, of course, is that most couples don’t have those conversations while suspended hundreds of metres above the ground.

If the first half of their story explains how they got here, the Empire State Building proposal explains why millions of people suddenly cared.

On paper, there is very little about this story that should have broken through in quite the way it did. We’ve watched people climb skyscrapers before. We’ve watched extravagant proposals. We’ve watched influencers chase increasingly elaborate spectacles in the hope of going viral. Social media has spent years conditioning us to expect something bigger every time we open our phones, yet within hours this had escaped the news cycle altogether and become internet culture.

AI edits appeared almost instantly, brands began replacing the couple’s banner with their own messages and people declared Angela the next Catwoman. The comments weren’t dominated by outrage so much as admiration. The arrest didn’t kill the story. If anything, it became part of it.

Undoubtedly, Angela and Ivan’s looks played a role. They are absurdly good-looking, and photographs of them standing above the Manhattan skyline moments before being arrested feel almost too perfectly composed to be real. They look less like two people facing criminal charges and more like the final frame of a Hollywood film.

But reducing the fascination to aesthetics misses something more interesting. Two artists / vandals / complete lunatics, depending on where you fall in the discourse, climbed one of the world’s most recognisable landmarks, unfurled a Jimi Hendrix quote about love, got engaged and were arrested minutes later. It was dangerous, illegal and unquestionably reckless, but it also felt strangely joyful.

At a time when so much online conversation is dominated by outrage, division and the pressure to immediately choose a side, this story somehow cut through all of that. For a brief moment, the internet wasn’t arguing. It was watching, laughing, creating memes, making AI edits, photoshopping new messages onto the flag and collectively wondering whether it had just witnessed the most outrageous proposal of all time.