NYFF Report: 'Sunshine Superman' Captures the Exhilarating Thrills of a Sometimes Deadly Extreme Sport
If you were among the two or three persons left unimpressed by Philippe Petit’s World Trade Center skywalk in the Oscar-winning 2008 documentary Man on Wire, maybe the cliff-diving antics in Sunshine Superman will give you the vertigo-inducing rush you’re looking for. With the help of some insightful interviews and remarkable archival home-movie footage, director Marah Strauch pieces together the story of Carl Boenish, a skydiver and cinematographer whose love of jumping off of really, really high places led him to create the extreme sport known as BASE jumping.
BASE stands for Building, Antenna, Span and Earth—those things that aspiring jumpers need to leap from to be considered an official member of the jumping community. Boenish got his start in 1978, by illegally parachuting off of Yosemite National Park’s towering El Capitan, a vertical rock formation, which soars 3,000 feet into the California sky. A skilled cinematographer, as well as an unrelenting daredevil, he recorded his jumps with cameras strapped to his helmet and attached to rickety rigs that extended over perilous drops. He took his footage to colleges, picking up new recruits like Jean Boenish, who became his wife and business partner. Eventually, mountain jumps expanded to the manmade aeries found atop skyscrapers, bridges and antenna towers, even as Boenish was spreading the gospel of BASE jumping around the world. His big moment in the spotlight came in 1984, when he agreed to plunge from Norway’s Troll Wall for a David Attenborough-produced television special, setting the Guinness world record for highest BASE jump.
You can search on Google to find out what happened next, or you can hold out and just watch Strauch’s documentary, which combines Man on Wire's high-wire tension with Drop Zone's mid-air adreneline rush. Footage of Boenish's various jumps, dug up by the filmmaker, is spellbinding and presents BASE jumping as both the greatest sport ever — and something only an insane person would do. And while Boenish himself remains something of an enigma — a mystique that Strauch enables by not delving too deeply into his personal history —Sunshine Superman does capture the thrill he must have felt leaping out into space with the sky above and the Earth below. His body may not, technically, be flying like the actual Superman, but his heart sure is.
Sunshine Superman will be released in select theaters nationwide on March 1, 2015
Photo credit: ©Magnolia Pictures
