The Golden Gate Bridge is an iconic structure. An engineering masterpiece. A triumph of human ingenuity and muscle over the elements. A symbol of San Francisco, the West, freedom – and something more, something almost spiritual but impossible to describe.

More people choose to end their lives at the Golden Gate Bridge than anywhere else in the world. The sheer number of deaths there is shocking but perhaps not altogether surprising. If one wants to commit suicide, that is, there is an eerie logic in selecting a means that is almost always fatal and a place that is magically, mysteriously beautiful.

The director and crew spent all of 2004, an entire year, looking very carefully at the Golden Gate Bridge, running cameras for almost every daylight minute, and filming most of the two dozen suicides and a great many of the unrealized attempts. In addition, the director captured nearly 100 hours of incredibly frank, deeply personal, often heart-wrenching interviews with the families and friends of these suicides, with witnesses who were walking, biking, or driving across the bridge, or surfing, kiteboarding, or boating underneath it, and with several of the attempters themselves.

THE BRIDGE offers glimpses into the darkest, and possibly most impenetrable corners of the human mind. The fates of the 24 people who died at the Golden Gate Bridge in 2004 are linked together by a 4 second fall, but their lives had been moving on parallel tracks and similar arcs all along.

Looming behind these stories is the Golden Gate Bridge itself, a monument that mirrors our highest aspirations and our lowest natures. We are uncomfortable with the grim realities suicide forces us to confront. We’d rather not see the mentally ill; we’d prefer suicides to be invisible — or at least to take place quietly in hotel bathrooms, barns, dorm rooms and closets.

THE BRIDGE is a visual and visceral journey into one of life’s gravest taboos.
 

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• Director’s Statement
• Meet the Filmmakers
• The Suicide Barrier at the Golden Gate Bridge
• Photo Gallery
• Credits

Reviews

“One of the most moving and brutally honest films about suicide ever made…
remarkably free of religious cant and of cozy New Age bromides. Eerie and indelible.”
-Stephen Holden, New York Times

“4 Stars (Highest Rating)…brave and unflinching, unshakably haunting and deeply mysterious.
I doubt I’ll forget it until the day I die.”
-Jim Emerson, Chicago Sun Times

“An essential piece of journalistic filmmaking: It de-romanticizes the idea of suicide by italicizing it in all its bleak, brutal reality, while making palpable the tortured predicament of those left behind.”
-Jan Stuart, New York Newsday

“The Bridge is both a beautiful film and a disturbing one, and the connection between those two characteristics makes it the most disquieting of documentaries.”
-Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times

“Undeniably powerful.”
-Variety

“The real item under consideration here is the movie itself, and the bottom line is that it lands in a humane place. The overall effect of the film is broadening. To see it is to dread the bridge jumps and to come away with a feeling of compassion and empathy.”
-Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle

“A serious, wrenching and oddly poetic documentary.”
-Lou Lumenick, New York Post

“A brutally discouraging spectacle, presented without a hint of sensationalism, and perhaps it is the film’s eerie placidity that makes the sudden fatalities, so devoid of drama, all the more disquieting.”
-Rossiter Drake, San Francisco Examiner