HOLLYWOOD, CA - MAN ON WIRE, the film based on Philippe Petit's illegal high wire walk between the World Trade Center Towers in 1974, has won the 2008 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. The film, also winner of the Grand Jury Prize for World Cinema Documentary and World Cinema Audience Award at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, was directed by James Marsh and produced by Simon Chinn. MAN ON WIRE is a dramatic account of the planning and execution of the high wire walk based on Petit's 2002 book "To Reach The Clouds."

On August 7, 1974, Petit, a French wire walker, juggler, and street performer days shy of his 25th birthday, spent nearly an hour walking, dancing, kneeling, and lying on a wire that he and friends strung illegally between the rooftops of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, a quarter mile above the sidewalks of New York City. Marsh's documentary brings Petit's extraordinary adventure to life through the testimony of Petit himself and some of the co-conspirators who helped him create the unique and magnificent spectacle that has become known as the artistic crime of the century.

To date, Petit has performed on the high wire more than 80 times around the globe, crowning with his wire such architectural monuments as Notre Dame Cathedral and the Sydney Harbor Bridge and creating unique artworks for such momentous events as the French Bicentennial at the Eiffel Tower, which was witnessed by 250,000 spectators, as well as the 1200th anniversary celebration of the city of Frankfurt before an audience of 500,000. He has completed more than a dozen walks in New York City, where he has been an Artist-In-Residence at The Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine since 1982. Philippe was presented with the prestigious James Parks Morton Interfaith Award, is the recipient of the New York Historical Society Award and was recently made Chevalier des Arts & des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture.