There’s a disturbing side to the “summit fever” that draws so many western climbers to Mount Everest. They put themselves and their guides at risk. 200 bodies of those who’ve lost their lives during failed ascents have never been recovered. And a good number of them are Sherpas.
In his new feature documentary Everest Dark, a world premiere in CPH:DOX, Canadian director Jereme Watt tells the story of Mingma Tsiri Sherpa’s attempts to retrieve bodies left on Everest (“Chomolungma”) as an act of tribute to a God angered by death and desecration on the mountain.
The director conducted his own vox pop experiment to try to work out what motivated the mountaineers.
“I interviewed over 50 western climbers and I asked them all the same thing. If you could climb Mount Everest but not post it on social media, if you could climb Everest and not tell anybody, would you do it?”
Revealingly, almost every respondent said no, they wouldn’t. This was what made Watt so fascinated by Mingma. He’s a near legendary figure among the Sherpas and has reached the peak of Everest 19 times, helping many western clients achieve their dreams in the process. There’s no ego about his mountaineering.
One tendency Watt has noticed in other mountaineering docs is that westerners “insert themselves into the story” even when they are ostensibly trying to take a local perspective. There are many reasons this happens, among them the fact that a western point of view will be easier for western audiences to follow. Watt, though, was determined to buck the trend.
The director wanted Sherpa voices to be heard and Sherpa faces to be seen. The documentary is narrated by Mingma’s father, Nima, now in his 90s, who had been a mail runner for Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay when they made their first successful summit in 1953.
“He’s an interesting fellow. I interviewed him three times over five years” Watt observes. Like his son, though, Nima is self-deprecating and not inclined to talk up his exploits. That meant the director had to “take a lot of his answers and elaborate them myself a little bit. I had to weave my voice into the story a little bit by taking his answers and fleshing them out a little bit.”
When he first thought about an Everest doc, Watt’s intention had been to tell the stories of the dead bodies left behind on Everest. “There were ten I was focused on. I wanted to tell their backstories.”
It was at this point, though, that his producing partner Michael Bodnarchuk put him in touch with Mingma. When Watt first talked to Mingma and discovered the Sherpa had climbed Everest 19 times, he was spellbound.
“I thought, wow, this guy is an incredible mountaineer. He has helped countless people reach the summit and he is not even an afterthought to their success.”
At that stage, Mingma still had the possibility to break the record for Everest accents. He only needed to go up a few more times to do so. Watt thought this could make a compelling story on its own and give the Sherpa some of the limelight he had been denied.
“But then, in 2015, I was filming with him and the earthquake hit. It totally derailed the entire story because the next year Mingma said the reason that earthquake is happening is that God is angry with the bodies and garbage left on the mountain and so I am not going to do it anymore.”
At that point, the director thought the entire film would have to be scrapped. But then the Sherpa then started talking about his desire to remove the bodies from the mountain to appease God.
“I basically became fascinated with that.”
Several camera operators were involved in the production including high altitude specialists who had been up Everest several times before.
“What I wanted to do with this documentary was do things a little differently. I wanted to do it without sit down interviews. I wanted to have it as a more cinematic feature film-like experience.”
Watt has spent 11 years on the project. He financed his early trips to the Himalayas on his own. “It was a big risk but it went into my obsession to complete this film.”
Once he had cut together a sizzle reel, he found two partners ready to option the idea. “But they went away for their own reasons. I think they thought it was just way too challenging to complete.”
Eventually, Watt partnered with Merit Motion Pictures (MMP) whose founder Merit Jensen Carr had a strong relationship with both Ina Fichman, the producer behind Oscar-nominated Fire Of Love and with execs at the CBC Documentary Channel. They were all drawn to the more spiritual side of the story.
There was still a danger that the film could have seemed morbid and exploitative. At the same, the director wanted to show “what is really there, left in their [the Sherpas’] backyard…I don’t think anybody wants those bodies left there.”
One ghoulish detail that the film highlights is the number of people who died on Everest in 2019 because there was so much overcrowding and such a long queue to reach the peak. The longer they waited, the more danger the climbers put themselves in.
“There were just so many people up there and if you don’t get up and down in time, that very thing can happen,” the director observes of the fatalities. “But it’s really complicated. It is such an industry there. I don’t claim to know all the answers but from what I’ve gathered, the Sherpas rely on these people to make decent money. Maybe it’s hard for them to turn away business and, in some cases with some companies, turn away clients that they might feel are not fit to actually climb Everest….I didn’t want to get into that too much in this film but I wanted to hint at it.”
Raven Banner is already on board to handle the Canadian theatrical release of Everest Dark.
