In a sentenceAluminium ladders over a crevasse in the dark, again and again, so somebody else can have the photograph
Everest base camp, Nepal, spring 2014. Phurba Tashi (himself) has stood on the summit twenty-one times and is going back, as head Sherpa for the expedition company run by New Zealander Russell Brice (himself). His family would rather he stopped. Brice’s paying clients, among them American climber Tim Medvetz (himself), arrive to acclimatise while Phurba, Pasang Tenzing Sherpa (himself) and the other Sherpas carry loads up through the Khumbu Icefall, crossing crevasses on lashed-together aluminium ladders in the dark. A puja ceremony blesses the season. The film recalls the previous year’s fight between Sherpas and European climbers. Then, on 18 April, a block of ice falls into the icefall and kills sixteen men, and the season Peedom came to film becomes a different film.
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Jennifer Peedom went to Everest to film a climbing season from the Sherpas’ side of the rope and came back with a film about a disaster. It is clear, angry and finely shot, and a little too easy on itself where the paying climbers are concerned.
Jennifer Peedom went to Everest in the spring of 2014 to make a film about work. Her subject was Phurba Tashi, who has been to the summit twenty-one times and leads the Sherpa team for Russell Brice, the New Zealander whose company guides paying clients up the mountain. The idea was to show what a season looks like from the end of the rope that does the carrying. Then, on 18 April, a block of ice fell into the Khumbu Icefall and killed sixteen men, and Peedom found herself holding a camera at the centre of the worst thing that had happened on the mountain in living memory. Sherpa is the most useful film about Everest we have seen, and the first that is not about getting to the top.
The three cinematographers, Hugh Miller, Renan Öztürk and Ken Sauls, shoot the mountain the way the men who work on it see it. There are time-lapses of base camp at night, the tents glowing orange under a sky full of stars, and before dawn a line of headlamps crawling up through the icefall. There are the ladders: lengths of aluminium lashed end to end across a crevasse, and a man in crampons walking over them with a load on his back, the blue drop beneath his boots in frame the whole time. Clients cross this a few times in a season; the Sherpas cross it over and over, fixing the route, hauling oxygen, hauling tents. Christian Gazal cuts these passages slowly and lets them sit, so that by the time anything goes wrong we understand exactly what the icefall is and who spends their mornings in it.
When it does go wrong, the film goes quiet. There is radio chatter, Brice’s voice trying to count his people, and then helicopters, and then bodies on long lines beneath the helicopters, swinging over the tents on their way down. We were horrified, and what did it was how still the camera held. Nobody runs towards anything. Later, in a meeting, one of the clients asks Brice whether the Sherpas’ “owners” can be talked to, and we felt a clean, cold anger we had not expected a documentary to give us. The film does not comment on the line. It does not have to.
Brice gets a fair hearing, which is to the film’s credit. He has built a business on these men and he plainly cares about them, and he plainly does not understand what they are asking for when they start to ask for it. Peedom gives him time to be reasonable, and to be frightened for his livelihood, and to be wrong. Tim Medvetz, one of his clients, is allowed the same courtesy. The film is on the Sherpas’ side, and it says so, but it does not pretend the other side is made of villains.
It is, though, a little pleased with itself about the Westerners. When a client says something foolish Gazal cuts to a reaction, and we felt the editing nudging us. The opening history lesson, which reaches back to Tenzing Norgay and the 1953 ascent and the long habit of Western climbers taking the credit, is rushed through in a few minutes and deserved more. Pasang Tenzing Sherpa, who seems the most articulate man at base camp, gets less screen time than he earns. And in the second half, as the season turns into a dispute between the Sherpas, the expedition companies and the Nepalese government, the film loses a little of its clarity about who is deciding what, and when.
Mountain films are usually about one person’s will: a climber, a summit, a question of whether he will make it. This one is about the people hired to make that will possible, and about what they are paid for the risk, and what their families think of it. Phurba’s wife and children are in the film, and they do not want him on the mountain, and the camera does not argue with them. The tagline on the poster is “Some live to climb. They climb to live.” It is the rare tagline that is also the argument.
See it before any other Everest film, and preferably before deciding to go there yourself. It is 96 minutes, certificate 15, and the ladders will stay with you.
The review calls the documentary unforgettable. It singles out its account of the Everest disaster from the Sherpas’ perspective.
Read the full review →The critic gives the documentary an enthusiastic recommendation, praising its visual magnificence and political urgency. She especially singles out the compelling human drama between guide Phurba Tashi Sherpa and expedition operator Russell Brice.
Read the full review →Kuipers gives the documentary a strongly positive verdict, praising its visual magnificence and emotional force. He especially highlights the filmmakers’ balance of intimate Sherpa stories with the disaster’s rescue efforts and political fallout.
Read the full review →The review finds the documentary spectacular, intimate and politically provocative. It praises the film’s forceful examination of Sherpas’ dangerous work and exploitation by Westerners.
Read the full review →O'Sullivan finds the documentary tense, fascinating and eye-opening, while noting that it avoids sentimentalising its subject. She praises its stark exposure of the dangerous, often unnecessary labor Sherpas perform for Everest tourists.
Read the full review →The critic finds the documentary compelling and damning in its account of Sherpa exploitation. He praises its sensitive portrayal of the community and its history, with the tragedy on the mountain intensifying its message.
Read the full review →
Meru · not reviewed yetThree climbers, one impossible face, and the camera up there with them.
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The Summit · not reviewed yetThe 2008 K2 disaster, and a Sherpa who went back up when nobody else would.
The Epic of Everest · not reviewed yetSilent footage of the 1924 attempt; the Sherpas are already there, already carrying.
Harlan County, USAA camera present when workers decide they have had enough; the same quiet fury.
