Sherpa, film review: stunning imagery of the Himalayan peaks but a depressing story

Jennifer Peedom shows the reality of the raught relationship between Sherpas and the western climbers who employ them

Jennifer Peedom, director of Sherpa (Felix Media 2014)

Jennifer Peedom’s impressive but downbeat documentary stands as a companion piece (and a corrective) to Baltasar Kormákur’s dramatic feature Everest. Peedom is exploring the fraught relationship between Sherpas and the western climbers who employ them. The Sherpas do the work and take the risks but are paid poorly and feel exploited.

By chance, Peedom was making her film during and in the wake of “the darkest day in the history of Mount Everest,” 18 April 2014, when 16 Sherpas were killed in the ice. In the wake of the tragedy, younger Sherpas were reluctant to continue climbing, at least for the season. “We can’t risk our lives just because foreigners have paid,” one says, expressing their feelings.

Sherpa is full of awesomely beautiful imagery of the Himalayan peaks but the story it tells is rancorous and depressing. There is archive footage of Tenzing Norgay, who climbed Everest with Edmund Hillary in 1953, and with Norgay’s descendants. Peedom manages to win the trust of all the involved parties: of the Sherpas themselves, the climbers and the tour operators. One of her subjects, Phurba Tashi Sherpa, has climbed Everest more than 20 times in the line of his work. The veteran tour leader Russell Brice is a self-evidently decent and conscientious man, but he ends up caught in the middle between his clients, who’ve invested fortunes in coming to Everest, and the Sherpas, whose welfare he tries to look after. The Nepalese politicians do little to help.

Some of the language used by the Western climbers has a colonialist and even racist feel to it. Some of the behaviour of the younger Sherpas (for example, when a climber who has sworn at them is attacked) is boorish and bullying.

No one here emerges in an especially positive light. There is bad faith on all sides but, amid all the bickering about money and safety, Peedom always also pays attention to the courage and selflessness of her subjects.

Jennifer Peedom, 96 mins