Leading UK Indie Wall to Wall, in association with new Indie Red Box Films, scooped two top awards at Sundance Film Festival this week for their feature documentary MAN ON WIRE, making it the only UK film ever to achieve the double accolade in the festival’s 24 year history.
MAN ON WIRE won both the Jury Prize and the Audience Award in the World Cinema: Documentary competition . To date, MAN ON WIRE is only the 6th film ever in the history of Sundance to pick up both top awards and the first from outside the US.
MAN ON WIRE is the extraordinary re-telling of Philippe Petit’s daring and illegal scheme to walk a high wire between New York’s Twin Towers in 1974. It tells the story of how Petit and his accomplices, executed their intricate plan to break into the nearly finished World Trade Centre towers. Narrowly avoiding capture, they managed to rig a wire between the buildings which Petit then danced on, with no safety net, for just under an hour. Eventually arrested, Petit’s walk became known as “the artistic crime of the twentieth century”. Combining archive and stills with modern day interviews and stylised reconstructions, the film plays like a heist movie, full of tension and immediacy, made all the more poignant by recent events . Variety’s review said the film “erupts on to the screen as one of the most wildly entertaining docs of recent years” and achieves “rare movie-watching giddiness”.
Jonathan Hewes, Deputy Chief Executive of Wall to Wall and the film’s Executive Producer attended the film’s Premiere at Sundance and today commented “For MAN ON WIRE to be awarded not one but two awards at America’s leading film festival is testament to the power of the film and to its potential for cinema release It is a fantastic reward for everyone involved in the production.”
The jury and audience award-winners of the 2008 Sundance Film Festival were announced at the Festival’s closing Awards Ceremony hosted by William H. Macy in Park City, Utah on Saturday 26 January 2008.
UK sales handled by Wall to Wall, North American sales by Submarine Entertainment, Rest of world sales by The Works International
