What a sad statistic: Not a month went by in 2004 without someone jumping to his or her death from the Golden Gate Bridge.

Sometimes two or three people made the despondent decision to climb over the guard rail, drop onto the nearby ledge and plummet into the water 225 feet below, meeting almost certain death. One man, remarkably, survived his suicide attempt, and he and his father are interviewed in the documentary "The Bridge," opening Friday at the Harris Theater, Downtown.

		'The Bridge' Director: Eric Steel Rating: R for disturbing content involving suicide, and for some language. Web site: www.thebridge-themovie.com/

Most of the people featured in the film, however, are the friends or relatives left behind, along with the strangers who became unwilling witnesses just by stopping to pose for photos or driving across the span or kiteboarding below. A little boy recalls the woman who put her bag down, told his older brother to call the cops and laughed before she went over.

Director-producer Eric Steel and a crew spent 2004 documenting the bridge, running cameras for almost every daylight minute and filming most of the two dozen suicides that happened in the process.

One camera provided a fixed vantage point while a second one featured an extreme telephoto lens, and Steel says in the movie's notes that the crew had the bridge office on speed dial if it suspected suicidal intentions from the strangers in the distance.

Although "The Bridge" sounds like a cheap snuff film, it's not. I would not want to watch someone I knew in these final moments (and it's not as if the deceased signed release forms), but Steel treats the victims with dignity.

He allows their parents, siblings or friends to talk about what they were like in happier days and what might have driven their desperation and how they feel as survivors. They are variously sad, philosophical, regretful, angry or, in one brother's case, in denial.

As is the fashion, there is no narrator, but "The Bridge" doesn't go the usual filmmaking routes by including, say, archival footage of the span being built or talking heads discussing methods and means of death.

The bridge, swallowed up by encroaching fog or glinting in the sunlight, is a beacon for people contemplating suicide, and this release has served as a rallying cry for installing barriers that would prevent such easy access to danger and death.

"The Bridge" also is a testament to the power of one tourist putting down a camera and looking with his eyes, instead of through the viewfinder and hauling a woman off the ledge by the back of her jacket.

That man is a Pittsburgh firefighter named Richard Waters. He lifts the stranger up like a strongman and recounts pinning her to the ground while he called 911 and then watching her turn to look at him before being taken away.

While a note at the end says more people have chosen to end their lives at the Golden Gate Bridge than anywhere else in the world, the movie is far from a manual on suicide.

Kevin Hines, the 24-year-old who survived that normally fatal four-second fall, says that despite writing a half-dozen suicide notes, despite spending 40 minutes sobbing while joggers and walkers passed by, despite even agreeing to take a photo for a clueless stranger, he regretted his choice the second he made it.

The moment his hands left the rail, he thought, "I don't want to die." And, miraculously, he did not.