Sherpa

source: Sherpa

Wow I am ashamed to be a New Zealander after watching this. All he cared about was the almighty dollar. Great documentary. As for the guy who asked who "owned" these men. Could not believe my ears. Disgusting.

I loved this documentary as I like many people am fascinated by Chomolungma, being it's the highest Mountain on Earth. The name 'Everest' should and the verb 'to summit' should be immediately be red flags. Nothing was discovered in the 1800s. Being named after some colonial white guy by the Royal Geographical Society instead of being called the Holy Mother in the local language. Hindi or Nepali Sagarmāthā, are much nicer names. I really think though that when you use and abuse locals and make things easy for people to climb and insult this mountain this should honestly be reflected in any film made about it. The things missing from this film about exactly the work that Sherpas do, how they really feel, and the selfishness of the capitalist system that allows people to try and tick off the 'biggest and best' when ethically what those customers are doing is highly questionable. How much really do the Sherpas earn as percentage? Shouldn't there be excellent schools, hospitals and adequate insurance for Sherpas? Some of the problems with garbage and climate change are not properly covered at all. Capitalistic money making from a Holy mountain should be properly regarded as a pretty hollow occupation, and someone risking their life to feed their family as pretty heroic, but this film seems sided with climbing company owners and clients by trying to be balanced between each side, when really one side is in the right and the other isn't. At the end of the day a real climber would walk up from sea level, hire a local directly or not at all, go without oxygen especially if under 8000 meters and bring all their own supplies in and out.

Even leaving aside the bleating from the typical ignorant yanks about terrorist sherpas and enquiring as to weather the Sherpas "owners" could intervene in the dispute. You were left with the manipulative guides. It was encouraging that the Sherpas didnt allow themselfs to be demeaned any further by the the climbers. This set of affairs could be replicated in most work places and societies across the world where worker and human exploitation occurs. I'd say a lot of these selfish climbers would gladly climb over any deceased bodies obstructing their goals.

Beautifully shot, Sherpa is certainly pretty to watch. The cinematography is stunning, assisted very much by beautiful natural landscape and the people at the centre of the film. Technically the film has little to no faults. But I feel as though it only captured a small part of the lives of the Nepalis who work at the mountain. It is very much a film about porters, but there is some distance between their job and them as people. The story at the centre of the film is fantastic, helped in no small part by the film crew being in the right place at the right time, while others were in the wrong place at the wrong time. It's a good film that captures a microcosm of the issues with the Everest tourism industry. I just feel that despite the big budget, the beautiful shots and access to the Sherpas that there is far more to their lives than Everest, and the final edit of the film could have addressed this. But otherwise a fine documentary.

I went in expecting a 'spectacle documentary' but Sherpa turned out to be so much more. As with so so many great documentaries, the film-makers went in expecting to make one type of film and came out with something much more than they could surely have hoped. The spectacle of the cinematography should be enough to draw an audience; if that fails the human story is powerful - moments of heavy emotion and a heart-rending look in a wife's eyes still rattle about in my head. Many other themes are strewn throughout also, giving the film a pleasing depth - politics, racial divides and differences, economic realities of mountain life and exploitation of nature amongst them. One of the greatest triumphs for me is that we go on our own expedition with the subjects but also with the film-makers: As their plans become derailed and their film goes in a direction they could not have expected we join them - We find ourselves embroiled in real- life drama and tragedy in perhaps the most dramatic of all locations on Earth.

Learned a lot from the ground floor of getting people up the mountain. Well worth the time. However it would have been nice to hear more from those responsible for managing the Sherpas. The film's subtitles are very poor. Small and white in color they more than once disappear in the ice and snow like a foot print in a blizzard.

As just a documentary, the film is beautifully produced. Unfortunately, I had a very hard time trying to find a good version to watch. I suspect there is a lot of pressure to keep this out of public view. If I recall in the doc they said that climbers typically pay 70k and upward to attempt the climb and it's a 350 million dollar (?) enterprise to the nepalese. So this is a major industry in nepal that certainly a lot of people do not want to upset. Very well photographed and edited and remarkably candid interviews. While I was watching this I wondered if the owners and the climbers actually believed what they were saying. I mean in one interview a climber actually likened the sherpas to terrorists and 9/11. I was astonished that there were so many they interviewed that had a similar view. Okay so you pay 70-100k to climb but the sherpas, at least according to the doc, see very little of this money but enjoy the most risks out of those making money off the enterprise. Unfortunately the doc is very sketchy about the overall economy of the operation but probably because it's most suitable in the written word. If anyone knows if this has been documented please post. That is, it would be interesting to see how the money gets distributed to the operators, nepalese government, local businesses, and the sherpas. And the film never quite explained how the losses are handled or if the operators or their clients have insurance to cover certain events. Anyway, the climbers pay a lot of money and then expect the sherpas, come 'hell or high water' to perform despite any disasters or risks involved. Sorry but I have no sympathy for the two climbers who attempted twice but were denied when their seasons were both shut down prematurely. Lucky for them they have the money to spend on such things. Personally I'd feel lucky just to afford to get to the base camp. But, using other people, even if absolutely necessary, to reach your personal goals, considering the risks involved, deserves appropriate compensation not exploitation, and an appreciation for individual choice. Anything else shows tremendous lack of wisdom and compassion.

The first review I wrote went into too much detail about the underlying narrative of this movie. Which I realise now is effectively a spoiler. So, let me get to the point. Watch this and get schooled in how the world really works and what some people really think beneath their veneer of respectability. I won't say anymore but this is an engaging film that says so much about the worth of respect for oneself and your fellow human being.....all under the guise of a documentary about Sherpas (which is does an admirable job with). It's a film dealing with much more than Sherpas but the global nature of privilege, greed, corruption, money and power. Watch it.

On the one hand, we have the overprivileged, looking to comfortably conquer Everest and willing to pay vast sums of money to goodness knows who, we learn of the devastation of their not being able to complete their climb and how, as such, a disaster is an inconvenience. On the other hand we have the local Sherpas looking to negotiate fairer conditions of work for their community, after decades of struggle and loss of life. The comments made about the "mob" of Sherpas and how they might be dealt with through their "owners" showed such a old-fashioned spirit of command that we are left wishing these climbers had continued their journey, on their own, each carrying their necessities for themselves.

This film was intended to be a follow up to a situation that had occurred the year prior in Everest, when there was a near riot by the Sherpas directed at climbers, due, we're told, to an increasing feeling among the Sherpa community that their skills and incredibly dangerous work was taken for granted by the climbers, the commercial companies and their government. Poorly paid, poorly insured, regularly dying - and starting to resent this. Sherpas aren't just mountaineers, they're the local people of the area, their wives, their families, their communities, desperately poor and highly reliant on foreign money from the ever increasing number of mountaineers, from which the Nepalese government take a 30% royalty, amounting to $180 million yet provide the communities with so little . This Australian documentary wanted to see what was happening and why the Sherpas might be so angry and "rebelling" after this high altitude fracas. What happened next gave the viewer an answer the film makers will never have expected. Totally tragically 16 Sherpas were killed by an ice fall in the most dangerous part of the climb, the negotiation of the Khumu Ice fall, which the climbers do twice but the Sherpas perhaps twenty times in supplying the camps. The surviving Sherpas became, naturally, very distressed, and following some very emotional meetings, decided to call off the rest of the season, at great person financial cost to themselves and their communities, but preserving their pride and respect for themselves and those that had died. But Russell Bryce's reaction was so incredibly insensitive, patronising certainly, but much worse than patronising, truly lacking humanity and compassion. HIs major concern appeared to be his commercial operation, blaming all the problems on a few young troublemakers who didn't know any better than to misbehave. This was echoed by the other foreigners, the climbers and the commercial operators, one even going to describe the angry Sherpas as "terrorists". Any Westerner, and certainly any New Zealander (Russell is one), with any sense of humanity or humility watching this documentary, the breathtaking scenery, and the literally breathtaking work of the Sherpas, would come away feeling more than a little ashamed of the attitudes that so many of our fellow Western travellers displayed in this film. Yet Russell Bryce has operated his company for twenty years; over that time he must surely have developed some sort of humane rapport with the Sherpas he employs? But it make one wonder, indeed, was that "rapport" just that of master and servant, and has he still not awoken to the fact he has made his money out of a severe imbalance in power, race and culture, that I thought might have been a bit more diluted since the long past days of the Raj, but in which view I would seem to be seriously mistaken.