Walking a Tightrope

Based on an incident in the life of director Nico Papatakis’s former friend and collaborator Jean Genet, WALKING A TIGHTROPE casts Michel Piccoli as Marcel Spadice, a thinly veiled version of the celebrated gay writer and provocateur, whose infatuation with an Arab-German circus worker (Lilah Dadi) leads him to try to turn the young man into the world’s greatest tightrope walker. When Marcel begins to pursue a new object of desire, however, his callousness unleashes tragedy.