Help us explore anxiety, triumph, and feeling human again through our documentary feature film Tightrope.

What is Tightrope?

Tightrope is a feature documentary about Curtain Up, Anxiety Down, a 12-week improv-based program for people living with social anxiety. Social anxiety quietly shapes an entire life, turning opportunities into threats and narrowing relationships and careers until avoidance becomes survival. This program confronts that fear directly. Week after week, participants are asked to show up, respond, and stay present with others. It is a form of exposure that pushes against deeply ingrained instincts to hide, and every choice to stay in the room carries real emotional weight.

But this program also makes space for something many of us have lost: play. Through improvisation, participants are encouraged to loosen their grip on control, to experiment, be awkward, make mistakes, and sometimes laugh at themselves. Tightrope follows this process from the inside, capturing moments of fear alongside moments of joy, release, and connection. By staying with the group over all twelve weeks, the film bears witness to a form of courage that holds both bravery and humor, and asks what might open up when people are finally allowed to reclaim both.

Director’s Statement

“Tightrope follows people who walk into class each week carrying fear, tension, and the old habit of staying small. They keep coming back because they want that to change. They keep coming back because deep down, they want connection and to feel comfortable in their own skin. 

This class is unlike anything I’ve seen. It blends improv and therapy, but without the clinical walls. It creates a strange pressure cooker of vulnerability, where people laugh, freeze, shake, talk over themselves, lose their words, try again, and, for the first time, maybe in years, let someone actually see them. 

My connection to this class started long before the film. I took it myself and felt something shift that I wasn’t expecting. It changed how I carried myself and how I understood my own anxiety. After spending more time in the room with Murray and Lesly and seeing the impact it had on others, I knew there was a story here that could really resonate. 

This documentary is not instructional. It is not full of talking heads explaining social anxiety. It’s lived, observed, and felt. The camera watches the way one person’s bravery gives another permission to try something they never thought they could do. The way people change each other without ever saying so. 

The film observes more than it explains. It listens, watches, and gives the audience space to feel the courage and vulnerability in the room. 

This is a story about what it means to try. And what it means to be met with kindness while you do.”

Jordan Shankman, Director