A TALL black-coated figure with wild, billowing hair mounts the safety railing of the Golden Gate Bridge, looks around him, and tips slowly backwards towards the water far below.

Gene Sprague’s death would be a dramatic scene in any film. In a documentary it is as shocking as anything in cinema history.

The Bridge, which is being screened at The Times BFI 50th London Film Festival on Monday, breaks one of the medium’s last taboos, by showing real deaths.

Six of the twenty-four people who killed themselves at San Francisco’s most recognisable landmark, in 2004, are shown jumping.

Brief portraits of their tragic lives, pieced together from interviews with family and friends, give the film shape and depth, but it is the footage of the jumpers that haunts audiences long after the credits have rolled.

The director, Eric Steel, said yesterday that he wanted to force his audience to “bear witness to something profoundly disturbing” and, through that, jolt them into re-evaluating their thoughts on suicide and mental illness.

However, his film has provoked a storm of controversy on both sides of the Atlantic.

It was rejected by several film festivals, including Cannes and Berlin, with one of the events’ organisers describing it as “voyeuristic, nothing more”. Suicide experts accused Steel of glamorising his subjects and cautioned that the film would trigger copycat deaths.

Professor Keith Hawton, of the Centre for Suicide Research, at Oxford University, said that the film’s approach was ill-advised and tasteless. “All research suggests that showing, in detail, methods of suicide does result in an increase of those methods immediately afterwards, so portrayal of methods of suicide is ill-advised.”

Mike Cobb, a Samaritans spokesman, said that footage showing suicide risked encouraging vulnerable people to take their own lives. “Even showing a method on Casualty has led to an increase,” he said.

Steel, 42, responded that, as the most popular suicide spot in the world, the Golden Gate Bridge “already has a copycat problem”. He said: “These people have serious issues, and the answer is not to not show the film. It is to find a way to deal with these people’s mental illnesses in a way that makes them feel they want to stay in this world.”

He developed the idea after reading an article in The New Yorker about some of the 1,300 people who have thrown themselves from the Golden Gate Bridge since it opened in 1937.

Trying to imagine their last moments, he thought of the bodies he had watched falling from the World Trade Centre towers on September 11, 2001.

“I don’t think we can understand that level of despair,” he said. “Those people jumped rather than die in an inferno. These people might be jumping to escape their own emotional infernos.”

Steel got the bridge authorities to co-operate by pretending that he was filming a series on national monuments. Filming from dawn to dusk for the whole of 2004, the crew captured 23 of the 24 suicides that year. He said that he wanted to make a serious contribution to the debate on mental illness and could not have done it without showing the deaths (although he did not tell his interviewees this). “To me, the most disturbing footage is not the film of people jumping. It is watching the people who walk by, when someone is standing on the ledge, and do nothing.”

Sandra Hebron, artistic director of the festival, said: “I am comfortable with the idea that there will be films in the festival that will divide opinion. I want people to talk about what they have seen. That’s what I want more than anything else.”

The Times BFI 50th London Film Festival

• Reviews and guide
• Picture gallery
• Video interviews
• Critics' weblog

  timesonline.co.uk/lff

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