3) The Bridge
There was vicious uproar in America when people realized what director Eric Steel had done for his 2004 film project entitled The Bridge. What had started off as a seemingly innocent portrait of admiration for San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge had now been revealed to be an analytic study of suicide.
Steel and his team deliberately lied to officials when they set up shop to shoot the bridge from afar; claiming to be filming Golden Gate just to drink in the strange mystery of the structure. A darker motive soon emerged, though, as the final release of The Bridge was revealed to be a documentary that captures depressed individuals hopping over the railings from Golden Gate and leaping to their deaths.
Steel was forced to face some difficult questions after The Bridge was screened, with some critics even angrily declaring that the director had made a snuff film disguised as a documentary. The movie is made up of snippets of footage (cut from thousands of hours shot over the course of a year) that records 23 people committing suicide by falling from the bridge, along with interviews with family members and friends of those who took the deathly leap.
Some have praised The Bridge for being a haunting, honest portrait of troubled souls, whereas others have labelled it as crass exploitation. The movie faced several small legal battles – mainly with Golden Gate bridge officials – but ultimately emerged victorious, continuing to receive both adulation and scathing criticism up to this day.
