‘The Balloonists,’ About Daring Adventure To Circle Globe, Debuts At TIFF

EXCLUSIVE: In 1991 a Swiss explorer and a British flying instructor attempted to do what had never been accomplished before: fly around the world nonstop in a balloon. They not only faced enormous technical challenges, and the risk of death, but competition in achieving the feat from billionaires and aeronauts.

The story of Bertrand Piccard and Brian Jones’s valiant endeavor is told in The Balloonists, which just made its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. We have your first look at the documentary directed by John Dower in the clip above. It’s a Rise Films production, presented by Anonymous Content and Red Bull Studios.

“When Rise Films first approached me with the story of Bertrand and Brian’s journey, I had never heard of it but, coincidentally, was reading a book on grief in which there was an unexpected account of balloonists, Gaspard-Felix Tournachon who, in 1858, took the first ever photograph of the world from the sky,” Dower writes in a director’s statement. “I was gripped by this story of an adventurer-slash-artist who enacts a cognitive change enabling us to look at ourselves from afar, to make the subjective suddenly objective.”

In his filmmaker’s statement, Dower highlights a paradox about being selected to direct.

“As someone with crippling vertigo and for whom ballooning meant something that happened at children’s parties, the coincidence was simply too alluring,” Dower writes. “So was Bertrand and Brian’s story – on one level it is an extraordinary adventure story with high stakes and dramatic twists and turns. On another level, it is an unlikely buddy movie that develops as a special bond forms between the two men in such extreme circumstances. And here also is a level of cognitive change whereby the overall story enables the viewer to look at themselves and their place in the world through the extraordinary journey these two men undertook.”

Dower “taps into a rich archive that captures all the highs and lows on camera,” TIFF’s chief documentary programmer Thom Powers writes in the festival program. “Virgin mogul Richard Branson was among the highly publicized aeronauts to encounter successive failures. The perils were numerous: technical malfunctions, changing winds, severe storms, ice formation, and the threat of certain countries shooting down unauthorized aircrafts.”

Powers continues, “Bertrand partnered with the English pilot Brian Jones on the custom-built Breitling Orbiter 3… The defiance of the odds brings to mind the documentary Man on Wire. Even if you know the ending, it’s white-knuckle suspense at every step.”

In the clip above, Piccard and Jones recall their feelings as the moment to embark neared.