The Bridge (2006 documentary film)
| The Bridge | |
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Film Poster
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| Directed by | Eric Steel |
| Produced by | Eric Steel |
| Written by | Eric Steel |
| Music by | Alex Heffes |
| Cinematography | Peter McCandless |
| Edited by | Sabine Krayenbühl |
| Distributed by | IFC Films |
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Release date
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Running time
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95 minutes |
| Country | United Kingdom United States |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $25,000 |
| Box office | $205,724 |
The Bridge is a 2006 British-American documentary film by Eric Steel spanning exactly one year (365 days) of filming at the famed Golden Gate Bridge which crosses the Golden Gate entrance to San Francisco Bay, connecting the city of San Francisco, California to the Marin Headlands of Marin County, in 2004. The film captured a number of suicides, and featured interviews with family and friends of some of the identified people who had thrown themselves from the bridge that year.
The film was inspired by a 2003 article titled "Jumpers," written by Tad Friend for The New Yorker magazine. The film crew shot almost 10,000 hours of footage, recording 23 of the known 24 suicides off the bridge in 2004.
The Golden Gate Bridge, which first opened in May 1937, was the most popular suicide site in the world during the documentary's filming, with approximately 1,200 deaths by 2003. (Its death toll has since been surpassed only by the Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge in China.)
The four-second fall from the Golden Gate Bridge sends a person plunging 245 feet (75 m) at 75 miles per hour (121 km/h) to hit the waters of the San Francisco Bay "with the force of a speeding truck meeting a concrete building." Jumping off the bridge holds a 98 percent fatality rate; some die instantly from internal injuries, while others drown or die of hypothermia.
In his article for The New Yorker, Tad Friend wrote, "Survivors often regret their decision in midair, if not before," supported by survivor Ken Baldwin explaining, "I instantly realized that everything in my life that I'd thought was unfixable was totally fixable—except for having just jumped."
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