Oscar-winning filmmakers Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, who last attended TIFF with 2018’s “Free Solo,” return to the festival with “Everest: The Other Side,” where documenting an expedition as dangerous as skiing down Everest’s north face meant accepting one hard rule from the start: The movie could never come first.
“Our teams handpick world-class climbers, skiers and cinematographers, so they all understand the risks,” Chin told TheWrap. “The directive from myself is that we’re his friends, we’re his supporters, we’re his teammates and climbers first, and the needs of the film never supersede the needs of the subject or the objective. It’s not the same as a normal production.”
The TIFF guide for “Everest: The Other Side” reads: Thousands of people have ascended Mount Everest from the southeast ridge in Nepal. But only five had ever summited from the more daunting direct North Face route from China. This became a quest for Jim Morrison and Hilaree Nelson, who sought not only to summit, but then to ski down through the near vertical Hornbein Couloir. It’s a test of athleticism that only a few have attempted with a zero success rate. The last person to try disappeared on the descent.
Morrison said that having cameras on the mountain didn’t compromise the expedition. If anything, it actually helped.
“I was actually able to talk to the camera people and say, ‘Hey, can you go up there and get a shot of this and show me the crux from this angle,” Morrison said. “If we contrast that to Tom Hornbein and Willi Unsoeld climbing this route in 1963 armed with a photo from 20 miles away, we had in-depth modern information to really understand exactly how to climb and exactly how to ski. It helped a lot.”
Both Vasarhelyi and Chin worked with a lot of the former crew from “Free Solo” on this project. Chin said the crew treated the production like an expedition.
“You look at best case, worst case. You’re thinking about all the different risks, you’re anticipating problems, but then that’s applied to the filmmaking as well,” Chin said.
In his review of the film, The Wrap’s Siddhant Adlakha wrote: “The Himalayas look serene from a distance. However, ‘Everest: The Other Side’ — from ‘Free Solo’ directors Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi — gets up close and deeply personal with the world’s highest, most unforgiving peaks. It follows a daring climber couple with their heads in the clouds, who seek to not only scale the perilous north face of the world’s highest summit, but against all odds, ski back down. What seems, at first, like a thrilling but familiar daredevil documentary soon reveals a harrowing work of self-reflexive cinema that’s as tragic as it is triumphant.”
