Sherpa

In 2013, the world's media reported on a shocking mountain-high brawl as European climbers fled a mob of angry Sherpas. Director Jennifer Peedom and her team set out to uncover the cause of this altercation, intending to film the 2014 climbing season from the Sherpa's point-of-view. Instead, they captured Everest's greatest tragedy, when a huge block of ice crashed down onto the climbing route...

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Documentary director Jen Peedom chronicles an industrial dispute like no other in her thoughtful account of high risk at high altitude, Sherpa.

Sherpa began life as an observational doc about the indigenous guides who are the literal backbone of the Himalayan economy. Peedom and her crew, including high-altitude cinematographer Renan Ozturk, had plans to shoot a season’s worth of footage to give a sense of ‘what it’s like’ to walk in a Sherpa’s boots over the course of a climbing season. Peedom’s plan was to highlight the unfair expectations placed upon modern Sherpas, and the patronising treatment they’ve received throughout history (the most infamous example being the royal snub of Tenzing Norgay, who conquered just as much of Everest as Sir Edmund Hillary, just not enough to score a matching knighthood).

Such were the circumstances by which Peedom’s crew came to be on the mountain on April 18, 2014, a date that bears the tragic distinction of being Everest’s deadliest day.

A notorious expanse of creaking, shifting ice gave way, and the resulting avalanche claimed the lives of 16 working Nepalis. The premise of Peedom’s film underwent a profound shift; its exclusive access before, during and after the crisis, captured everyone’s worst fears being realised, in real-time.

The elite mountaineers of Nepal’s east are naturally acclimatised to the extreme altitude of the region’s peaks and passes, so they’ve found consistent work acting as guides and porters for the swelling numbers of tour groups that attempt to conquer the world’s highest mountain peaks each year.  A season’s work can feed the family for a year – but it’s a profession with potentially life-threatening occupational hazards: According to labour statistics, the death rate for working Everest Sherpas in the decade to 2014 was 12 times higher than that of U.S. military personnel stationed in Iraq between 2003- 2007.

The tourist trade for Himalayan expeditions is booming, and some tour operators in Nepal now offer the ‘glamping’ experience for the affluent trekker. However, those widescreen TVs and bookcases at base camp aren’t going to set up themselves, so it falls to the Sherpas to do the heavy lifting. When the trekkers bunk in for the night, they do so oblivious to the fact that their guides work through the night, trudging back and forth over the most dangerous expanses of the mountain – up to 30 times! – to transport the group’s gear (spare oxygen, propane, food, water and ladders) to higher ground. They make multiple trips in the darkness and their prolonged exposure to slippery, unstable terrain is a source of frustration and fear.

In Sherpa, our own guide to the story is Phurba Tashi Sherpa, a family man and senior climber with Kiwi mountaineer Russell Brice’s firm, Himalayan Experience. The start of the 2014 climbing season promises to bring Phurba Tashi several thousand steps closer to reaching a record number of summits. His petrified wife offers the grim reminder that every ascent has the potential to be his last; she pleads with him to stop pushing his luck but without an alternate source of family income, it’s no surprise when we see Phurba Tashi report for duty on day one of the doomed season.

The stakes are high as we observe the various parties assembling for the 2014 climb. Some of the trekkers are returning customers who had forfeited an earlier trek (and its $45,000 fee) when Brice, fearing disaster, aborted Himalayan Experience’s 2012 season.

Brice had been widely criticised for ‘overreacting’ to the danger posed by a section known as the Khumbu Icefall, a chaotic assemblage of ice shards that looms, ominously, over the 17,000-ft base camp. However, he received grim vindication on April 18 2014, when a wedge of ice the size of a super-yacht broke away from the same section that had spooked him two years earlier. The disaster caused the highest number of deaths on a single day in the region.

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