Across the Sky

On November 15, 2015, French slackliner Théo Sanson rigs a line between two sandstone towers in Castle Valley, Utah: The Rectory and Castleton Tower, a gap of nearly 500 meters. The film follows the rigging process itself, ropes hauled across the canyon by hand, anchors checked, tension measured, before it turns to the walk. Sanson crosses the line hundreds of feet above the desert floor, and the camera holds on the exposure: the drop below him, the wind moving the line, the distant walls of the valley. What footage exists of the attempt is intercut with shots of the crew tracking his progress from the ground and from the towers themselves. There is little narration beyond what the images need; the achievement is the story, an attempt at what was, at the time, one of the longest highline crossings completed in the American desert. The short runs on the strength of that single walk and the canyon it happens in.