Twin Towers high-wire act immortalized in documentary

0 Comments | AFP, August, 2008

LOS ANGELES (AFP) — New York's World Trade Center will forever be instantly associated with the horrors of September 11, 2001 but a long-forgotten and inspiring perspective of the Twin Towers emerges in a new documentary by British film-maker James Marsh.

Titled simply "Man on Wire," Marsh's acclaimed film charts the daring feat of French tightrope walker Philippe Petit, who on August 7, 1974, linked the two towers with a cable before spending 45 minutes "dancing" on the wire amongst the clouds, 1,400 feet (427 meters) above the streets of New York.

The absorbing film, a winner at this year's Sundance Film Festival to be released in the United States on August 8, strikingly makes no reference to the eventual destruction of the towers on America's day of terror 27...