My wife and I no longer climb much for recreation as I’m too lazy to train for the level of fitness required but I still retain a interest for what goes on in that milieu. Combine this with the fascination that most people have for the goings-on at Everest, and you have the explanation for why I wanted to watch this documentary by Australian filmmaker Jennifer Peedom.
This was filmed during the 2014 climbing season and focuses on Phurba Tashi, the Sherpa team leader who works for Russell’s Brice’s Himex tour operator. Having summited 21 times already, he would be due to break the world record if he reached the peak at least once more. The documentary begins by showing Tashi with his family at his home village of Khumjung. All of them are well aware of the high mortality rates associated with his job and his wife is especially fearful that he will die on the mountain one day. Tashi however frankly states that there is no other work available that will provide as much income and seems to be less concerned by the spiritual aspects of not properly respecting the mountain. We later move on to scenes in which we see the Sherpas go to extreme lengths to make the clients comfortable and the immense amount of work that this requires, mostly out of sight of the clients. But when an ice avalanche kills 16 Sherpas, the focus switches to the disaster and its consequences for the remainder of the season.
The avalanche delineates the documentary into two distinct halves. Peedom obviously wasn’t expecting it to happen but when it did, allowed the event to dominate the rest of the film. While I would agree that the disaster is hugely dramatic and filled with tension, I actually found the first half of the documentary to be more interesting and informative. One of my favorite scenes is Tashi teaching some of the newly recruited Sherpas how to safely walk across a ladder that has been placed horizontally to traverse a gap. It’s a poignant reminder to me that while the Sherpas have bodies that are well adapted to the high altitude, we shouldn’t take it for granted that all of them naturally know how to climb. Another scene is where the Sherpas need to decide who should carry which load and effective draw lots using stones while joking around about which load is the heaviest.
By contrast, I didn’t like the almost moment to moment coverage of the disaster. While it does capture some of the sense of what it feels like to be present on site during a terrible event like this, it feels voyeuristic and doesn’t actually provide much new information. I did like that it shows how the consequences play out in unexpected ways. The Sherpas as a whole seem really reluctant to continue the climbing season but feel uncomfortable about openly stating this out loud. Peedom doesn’t shy away from suggesting that Brice isn’t altogether honest when he tries to blame the troubles on a few bad apples among the Sherpas instead of acknowledging that this is really a collective decision. Plus it was disgusting although not altogether surprising that Brice basically had to manhandle representatives of Nepal’s government to come and do something about the disaster. I don’t know how accurate the portrayal here is but it strikes me as weird how weak of a presence the Nepalese government seems to have near the Everest Base Camp.
The documentary leaves out plenty of information that I had to later look up for myself to understand the issues concerned. For example, Brice, and obviously Peedom herself, believe that more could be done to improve the safety of the Sherpas but doesn’t provide much in the way of detail. Apparently one easy way to do that would be to allow helicopters to transport the required gear past the icefall zone instead of requiring that everything be carried by Sherpas. I don’t quite understand why the Nepalese government maintains such restrictions but I also realize that this practice, while making the Sherpas’ job easier and safer, would also reduce the tour operators’ need for Sherpa labor. I wonder how the Sherpas would feel about such a development. Another obvious way to improve safety would be to greatly reduce the number of climbing permits, perhaps increasing the cost of each one to compensate. This would clearly be in the interests of Brice, as the owner of one of most elite of the operators, but again, would this be in the interests of the Sherpas? This documentary simply deep enough to confront these questions seriously.
Between the spectacular shots of the mountainside, the testimonials of the Sherpas and its respectful effort to showcase their culture, this films is still well worth watching. But as is too often the case for documentaries, I often end up wishing that they lean more on informative side than the emotive one.