It takes courage to climb the world’s tallest mountain and shoot a documentary. To do it a second time and face the challenge of failing to meet the bar set for oneself is a whole other gamble. That’s one risk entailed in Lucy Walker’s thrilling documentary Mountain Queen: The Summits of Lhakpa Sherpa, which follows her 2006 doc Blindsight about a group of blind Tibetan students trekking up the mountain. However, to say that Walker repeats herself with another mountain doc is like saying that Martin Scorsese is caught in the rinse cycle with another mob movie. Mountain Queen is a thrilling feat of filmmaking.
The films have some obvious similarities, but are notably different as Mountain Queen shares the incredible life of the climber who was the first Nepali woman to summit Mount Everest—and did so ten times. When asked what drew her back to Everest, Walker, who isn’t a climber herself, is quick to respond. “Lhakpa, in a word,” she says, speaking with POV via Zoom. Walker, who met Sherpa in 2004, notes that the climber hadn’t quite received her due aside from a profile in Outside magazine.
From the Top of Toronto
Mountain Queen marks another triumph for Lucy Walker and Lhakpa Sherpa alike with their shared return to Everest. The film hits Netflix this summer after a booming response at last fall’s Toronto International Film Festival, where it debuted as a work in progress and drew thunderous applause each time Lhakpa conquered the mountain.
Walker says the TIFF cut and the final product are fairly close, but the Netflix version includes additional archival material. It also features a new score by Adam Peters that kicks the emotions up a notch. But Walker says the festival bow helped give Lhakpa’s story the finesse it deserves. “We didn’t have any money to do final music and licensing, but we needed to sell it and we did,” she admits.
The director says that she got to experience the reception with Lhakpa and her two daughters, Sunny and Shiny, in real time as the family elected to see the film for the first time with an audience, rather than during post-production. “I screen edits weekly in the editing room and show it to little test audiences,” explains Walker. “I edit by using the fresh eyes of my ragtag focus group, deliberately solicit negative feedback, and really hone the story so that it’s as clear and effective as it could possibly be.” By the time it got to Toronto, Walker says she knew she had a potential hit “There was no question that people weren’t going to be blown away by this movie. I was fully confident of that.”
Back to Everest
After taking an interest in Lhakpa’s story, Walker explains that Sunny vetted her on her mother’s behalf and gave her approval. Lhakpa, like many women Sherpas, can’t read or write due to limited access to education for young girls and expected life paths. However, Walker says that Lhakpa took Sunny’s endorsement, especially with the director’s work on Blindsight, in addition to a strong filmography that includes the Oscar nominated Waste Land (2010), the snowboarding doc The Crash Reel (2013), and the firefighter film Bring Your Own Brigade (2021), all of which demonstrate the sense of scale required to capture Sherpa’s story.
“I was really passionate about telling her story and because of my experience making Blindsight, we did two Himalayan expeditions to make that movie back in 2004,” says Walker. “I had an incredible opportunity to learn how to make a narrative character-driven vérité documentary about a climb in every way—how to shoot it, how to think about risk, how to staff it, how to find the right collaborators, how to work with those collaborators to really empower them to contribute best.”
Lessons from Blindsight
One key element that Walker could build upon was how to use the mountain climb to structure a film. Blindsight follows the group up the mountain with American adventurer Erik Weihenmayer leading six young climbers and blind German social worker Sabriye Tenberken up Mount Lhakpa-Ri, the 7000m peak opposite the north face of Mount Everest. Mountain Queen, meanwhile, joins Lhakpa every step of the way during her tenth summit to the top of Everest.
Both films weave in the climbers’ backstories to convey the significance of the summit in helping them overcome personal hurdles. Blindsight draws upon a lecture in which Weihenmayer discusses his adventures and shares how the expedition served as an opportunity to debunk the stigma associated with blindness in Tibet. In between the mountain shots, vérité scenes in the streets show the climbers encountering insults from passersby. In another scene, the mother of one climber tells the camera: “The cleverest child has gone to waste. Without eyes, a man in not complete.”
Blindsight also finds a triumphant underdog story in the narrative thread about 19-year-old Tashi. Walker learns how he was born in China and was sold as a child, enduring endured mental and physical abuse before connecting with Tenberken. The film offers threads with each climber, but sharpens its focus in the final act by accompanying Tashi on his journey back to his village in China. The trek proves more courageous than his endeavour on Lhakpa-Ri.
Lhakpa’s Peaks and Valleys
In Mountain Queen’s case, Walker crosscuts Lhakpa’s summits with her tale of overcoming gender roles to become a successful mountain guide and climber in her own right. Mountain Queen gets some strong footage from Lhakpa’s early climbs and her formative years as a guide via clips from the 2000 documentary Daughters of Everest. Walker says that the filmmakers graciously let her use the dailies from which she mined a wealth of candid moments that show Lhakpa’s fearlessness.
Walker sees Blindsight’s influence here. “We wove together the unfolding journey with the incredible backstory of the summits of her life,” she notes. The doc also recounts dark times in Lhakpa’s personal life, including a turbulent marriage with Romanian climber, Gheorghe Dijmărescu.
Lhakpa initially proves reluctant to discuss the abusive relationship with Walker, but she gradually reveals her vulnerability. Well aware that there’s more to her story, particularly her inner strength that matches her physical prowess, Lhakpa tells how she extricated herself from her marriage to protect her girls. Unflinching archival material, including photos by journalist Michael Kodas, underscore the gravity of the physical and emotional scars that Lhakpa heals by ascending the mountain. Weaving between the 2022 Everest expedition and the ones that precede it, the contrast in Lhakpa’s spirit is palpable as she summons her will once again with hopes of inspiring Sunny and Shiny, but also any young women who’ve been told they can’t climb the mountain, whatever their “mountain” may be.
“Blindsight is much more of an ensemble structure, but in a certain way, the structure of the present-day climb as a narrative spine and letting the backstory unfold over that climb is the structure for Mountain Queen,” observes Walker.
“That was undoubtedly the experience of editing Blindsight where I devised the structure where you have that climb as a through line, but you’re able to hang the present-day moments on the backstory. Blindsight had eight characters and we get a beautiful backstory that feeds into the main narrative, but actually does justice to the people at the moment in the climb that makes sense for them. Blindsight is eight people and we had nine previous summits [in Mountain Queen], and each summit had a metaphor.” Walker says that moving from an ensemble film to an “ensemble” of summits helped her lay out her index cards quickly in the editing suite and bring Lhakpa’s story to screen.
A Family Story
Walker adds that spending time with the family let her see the day to day dynamics as Lhakpa worked and Whole Foods by day and her kids didn’t quite grasp her achievements. The film finds a powerful arc through Sunny’s reluctance to embrace her mother’s quest. “I don’t let people film the press release moments of their lives,” Walker says. “You don’t make very good documentaries that way. I like to get in when the stuff’s actually happening and when stuff’s actually happening. If you’ve got the right team in the right place at the right time, stuff’s going to happen and it’s going to happen on camera.”
For example, the film delivers one of its best moments when Sunny opens up at the family home. The film sees Shiny accompany her mother to the Himalayas while Sunny stays and gives Lhakpa the silent treatment. (Although her check-ins with her sister eventually betray her interest.)
Walker says that moment came after rolling one night—after the sound recordist had gone home, the cameraperson was downloading the cards, and she was catching up with a bite to eat—and Sunny, ever the teenager, emerged from her room and wanted to chat. Walker says she recognized the moment, threw down her dinner, flicked on the kitchen lights, grabbed the mic pole, and told her camera operator to roll. “And then the scene just unfolded. It was so exciting to see Sunny lighting up and be so inspired by her mom’s climb,” says Walker. “I’m not a script writer here. Life’s writing the script. I’m just there with the film team saying, ‘Roll. This is the moment. We are not here tomorrow, and she hasn’t really spoken like this yet to my knowledge. This is got to be captured.’”
Capturing the Climb
All these snippets from the Sherpa family’s daily life, moreover, make audiences so invested in Lhakpa’s climb. Walker captures the summit remarkably with a range of coverage that easily gives Mountain Queen the most eyes a film has ever seen on Everest. Walker explains that the coverage comes in part through weeks of talking and planning with DPs to map out the shoot, but that’s only part of the logistics of shooting on the mountain. She also credits the tenacity of altitude climber Matt Irving, who summitted all the way to capture Lhakpa’s historic return to the top of the world. But that’s only part of the film’s awesome shoot.
“You have to account for the fact that at any moment the DP’s going to succumb to altitude, so all the Sherpas on Lhakpa’s team had camera equipment and were trained. They got some beautiful material,” says Walker. That feat arguably proves a first in terms of coverage by Sherpas, as some earlier docs had moments caught by guides—Jennifer Peedom’s Sherpa (2015), for example, had icefall shots caught by Sherpas—but nothing to this extent. The participatory nature adds to the documentary’s significance as it gives Lhakpa her due, but also acknowledges through its design the many guides who contribute to a climb’s success.
Having such experienced climbers behind the cameras is a key element when capturing a risky endeavour that affords no room for second takes. “I learned this making Blindsight: Just because you’re on the mountain doesn’t mean you’re going to be standing next to the DP with some good ideas,” explains Walker. “In fact, you are more likely to be throwing up without being able to summon a thought in your head. You can’t rely on anybody not succumbing to altitude, even the most experienced people. It’s not just about being physically fit. Acclimatization is a completely separate dimension of one’s physicality.”
Everest Then and Now
When asked what’s different between shooting on Everest on 2004 for Blindsight and in 2022 for Mountain Queen, Walker says little has changed aside from having to do more with less budget-wise this time around. “Dealing with mechanics of the mountain is the dominant factor here. The altitude and the logistics and the difficulty of that environment as a production environment and as a team-leading environment is very much the same,” says Walker.
“What’s different from a technical point of view is that drones are different. We were using a range of the biggest, best video cameras at the time, and some slightly smaller ones, slightly more compact ones. We didn’t have the Alexa on the top of Everest, for example.” Walker notes that she shot Blindsight with two compact Varicams, but that even colour graders need to acclimatize to the logistics of a mountain shoot. “The colour grading guy was like, ‘Wait a second: this is not the same camera. What kind of camera was this, Lucy?’” she laughs. “And I said, ‘That is a camera on the top of Mount Everest.”
Besides the breathtaking (finely colour corrected) money shot atop the world, what ultimately sets Mountain Queen apart from the chain of mountain movies is Lhakpa herself. “She just displays such visionary grace and courage to overcome, to do better, to rise above those challenges, and to keep on climbing when she’s knocked down,” says Walker.
Mountain Queen: The Summits of Lhakpa Sherpa debuts on Netflix July 31.
