For more than 400 years the members of the Traber family have been high wire artists, balancing through space and times, across borders and walls. "Die Seiltänzer" presents a number of high wire groups that belong to this family, which existed both in Eastern and in Western Germany, rivalling for a while after the fall of the Wall and outbidding each other with spectacular and risky actions. These include world record runs over a length of 600 meters in Berlin or Baden-Baden: one had to be called off, the other was overshadowed by a tragic accident. Encounters with the children, women and men of this family also depict the quiet moments of their reflections on their traditional lives, lives they are born into for the sake of risking the same in public, on both sides of the divide between East and West. Jochen Wisotzki's reserved, though highly attentive filmcaptures a melancholy image of an art that stands in pleasant contrast to a present that is characterized by screen sensations.