Sunshine Superman

Carl Boenish spent the sixties jumping out of aeroplanes and filming other people doing it. Over time he moved from aircraft to fixed points, to cliffs and towers and bridges, and he is now regarded as the father of what became BASE jumping. The footage he shot on his own 16mm camera is the spine of this documentary. In 1984 he and his wife Jean set a Guinness record jumping from the Troll Wall in Norway. A few days after the record, Carl was killed on another jump from the same wall. Marah Strauch does not turn that into a cautionary tale; his life is told as a matter of belief rather than a list of risks. Jean, speaking now, sits at the centre of the film. Archive footage, reenactments and newly shot aerial photography all chase the same sensation: what it is like to leave the ground.