The man who fell from the sky: what drove Carlito Vale to stow away in the landing gear of a jumbo jet?

One of several heart-wrenching moments in Rich Bentley’s documentary The Man Who Fell from the Sky sees the filmmaker in a down-at-heel suburb of Beira, the second-largest city in Mozambique, interviewing a sad-eyed woman called Anna. Anna is the widow of Carlito Vale, the 30-year-old stowaway who fell from the undercarriage of a British Airways flight in June 2015, landing on the roof of an office block in Richmond, south-west London. 

She is asked through a translator how she feels about the documentary team focusing on the life of her late husband. She pauses, looks at the camera, and smiles. “You recognise that he’s a human being,” she says.

This impulse – to acknowledge the individuality, the meaning of refugee lives – is central to Bentley’s superb and complex film. I speak to the director over Zoom from his London home, only a few miles from where Vale met his grisly end, and ask him why he zeroed in on this particular story. 

“When I started in 2015, it was right in the middle of the migrant crisis and the news was full of these really dangerous and horrifying journeys,” he tells me. “I heard about this phenomenon of people stowing away in the landing gear of planes and I couldn’t imagine anything more terrifying. It really sat with me. For a long time, I couldn’t stop wondering how you end up in a situation when that is your only option.”

In the past 10 years, 44 people have been recorded attempting to stow away in the landing gear of commercial aircraft. Of these, only eight survived the mixture of sub-zero temperatures and lack of oxygen. Like the stories of migrants braving perilous waters in ramshackle boats, these tales illustrate the measures that the terrified, hungry or desperate are willing to undertake to reach the relative safety and bountifulness of British life. 

At one point in the film, Bentley goes with a retired pilot to view the compartment in which a jumbo’s landing gear is stowed. He climbs up into the claustrophobic space, with its network of hydraulic pumps and wires, and we get a true sense of how terrifyingly exposed the stowaways are seven miles above the Earth, with nothing between them and the howling void but a thin carapace of cold metal.

What’s extraordinary about the story of Carlito Vale is that no one, least of all his widow, truly understands why he did it. 

Vale had grown up in one of Beira’s many Western-run orphanages, his parents victims of the 1977-92 civil war that tore Mozambique apart, killing more than a million civilians. He worked in a number of temporary, menial jobs, both at home and as a migrant worker in South Africa. Then he met Anna, whom he married early in the 2000s. 

He started making more regular trips to South Africa. “Then he went away without saying anything… he didn’t pick up his phone and he left me in the dark,” Anna tells Bentley. It turns out Vale left not only Anna, but also a daughter, Shamilla, now 11.

“It was perhaps the most emotional beat, if you like, of my five-year journey. The grief they were still living through was so raw,” Bentley tells me. “It galvanised the idea that each of these stories is a real person with a network of connections, and they leave losses just as we would if we died.”

Bentley’s visit to Anna and Shamilla leaves him deeply conflicted. What some would see as the last roll of the dice by a desperate man could, in another light, appear an act of selfish abandonment. “It was heartbreaking,” Bentley tells me. “And really interesting, because I felt quite angry when I left. He had this family unit and he left them.” 

Bentley knew that he might not end up finding the uplifting story he’d been looking for, and it’s to his – and the film’s – credit that he allows the ambiguousness to persist, that he doesn’t seek to shape the narrative to fit a particular didactic end. 

But Bentley’s film, it turns out, is a tale of two quests, because Vale didn’t travel on the BA flight alone. He was with a friend, Justin. The men had travelled to Johannesburg together where they had paid a trafficker who promised them a place on a flight bound for Britain. It was only when they arrived at the airport that they understood that, far from a seat on the plane, they were to take up a much more perilous position. The men went through a barbed-wire fence and out on to the airstrip where they climbed into the undercarriage compartment.

Justin, who survived the flight, disappeared into the British asylum system, seemingly without trace, and Bentley’s film turns into a hunt for him as the filmmaker darts from one end of the country to another following leads, handing out his telephone number and door-stepping refugee centres.

Over the course of the film, he becomes increasingly driven, even obsessed by the task of finding Justin. “As a filmmaker, I wanted to find out the story behind it,” he tells me.

“It almost felt like there might be a kind of journalistic tribute I could pay. That by telling a single story it would represent all the other stories that we were hearing at the time.”

When Bentley finally meets Justin, and the two men walk through a Liverpool twilight together, it’s a profoundly affecting sight.

This, in the end, is what turns a film about migration into something far more powerful and moving. We understand how dizzyingly intricate are the networks that surround a single life, how difficult it is to pin an individual to the kind of well-shaped narratives we see in the news. Whether it’s the story of Carlito, falling through the sky and leaving his family bereft, or Justin, saved from his friend’s fate by a lucky snag of hydraulic wire, we finish the film with a deeper and more truthful understanding of what drives people to risk it all to make new lives. 

Films are often described as a journey, but the lengths we travel, both literally and metaphorically, in The Man Who Fell from the Sky are vast.

The Man Who Fell from the Sky is on Channel 4 tonight at 10pm