Review: Walking on Water

Installation artist Christo "walking on water" on Lake Iseo in Italy in 2016

The 43rd Hong Kong International Film Festival is already underway and I bought tickets to watch seven documentaries.

Hundreds of thousands of people visited the project

The first one was this evening, Walking on Water, a 2018 documentary about the installation artist Christo and his project in 2016 to create 3km of floating pontoons covered in yellow fabric. It was a project he and his wife and collaborator Jeanne-Claude had created back in 1970 and tried to get permission to do this several times and were denied each time.

In the 50 years they were together, they were able to create 24 works, many dozens more denied permission. But Jeanne-Claude died in 2009 after complications of a brain aneurysm and Christo didn't do much afterwards, which is where the documentary starts, watching him finish off his sketches of Walking on Water.



It turns out he has permission to make his project a reality at Lake Iseo, in northern Italy near Switzerland. He's 85 now, and the viewers can see how passionate he is about his work, how he is determined that things must be done his way, and it is his will that keeps him active and alive. There aren't many people in their 80s who are as mentally and physically active as he is, constantly talking to people from school children to officials about his work and traveling everywhere on a tight schedule in all weather conditions.

The walkway is made of plastic cubes screwed together

He tells New York students that an artist never stops doing art; it is not like a job you switch off, but something you do everyday, all the time. It's probably too deep for them to understand, but do they even know who Christo is?

He is grateful to the local Italian authorities for allowing him to do Walking on Water, where he promises the people will literally be able to walk on water for three kilometres, and then we watch a team of people get to work.

They build pontoons made of 220,000 dense polyethylene white cubes that are screwed together tightly, and when they are put out into the water, they do as Christo had hoped, undulate with the waves like fabric and he is so excited.

Out on the dock is an army of women with sewing machines, madly sewing the 100,000 square metres of yellow fabric together and they are placed in giant white bags and helicoptered to various spots.

Overview of the 3km walkway with another in the far right

But then lightning strikes in the evening and there are fierce arguments about how they are going to get this all done in time. Christo also gets into verbal fights with his assistant Vladimir Yavachev, but in the end he supports the artist in getting the work done by being the liaison with all the other people they have to deal with. It's a huge logistical operation. It's amazing Christo did this before without computers and smartphones.

In the end Walking on Water is realized on time but now there's another challenge -- hordes of people are descending on the place and the pontoons can't handle 50,000 people in one day when they were expecting 45,000 people for two weeks.

The local government wants to cash in on the event as much as possible without regard to safety, which is Christo's main concern and things come to a head.

There is also the uncomfortable scene of Yavachev trying to sell Christo's sketches of Walking on Water because they fund the installation projects, but the prices go up each day by tens of thousands of US dollars, frustrating one Italian buyer.

Throughout the film I wondered what he was thinking... was he thinking about Jeanne-Claude and what she would say about the project? There was no asking Christo about this. Instead the camera follows him constantly, the footage dizzying at times and captures whatever unfolds.

Nevertheless the project looks stunning and something the public enjoys and interacts with the work just as Christo had hoped.

However, Walking on Water the documentary would have benefited more with some reflection from Christo or maybe the filmmakers didn't want to interfere. He doesn't seem to care the camera is there, he is wrapped up in his work.

Christo does not stop either -- the last scene has him in Egypt watching camels walking in the desert and he is plotting his next project...

Walking on Water (2018)
105 minutes
Directed by Andrey Paounov