“The Last First: Winter K2” is a rare documentary that chronicles the impossible – climbing K2 in the dead of winter, when the weather is the most treacherous and punishing.
The latest documentary from filmmaker Amir Bar-Lev, who directed “My Kid Could Paint That,” just premiered at Sundance Film Festival, with the director returning to the festival after “The Tillman Story” (from 2010), “Happy Valley” (from 2014) and “Long Strange Trip” (from 2017) for one last go-around in Park City, Utah.
According to the official Sundance program “The Last First: Winter K2” “tells a complex, harrowing, and moving story that unpacks the industry of extreme mountain climbing and its changing culture.” It chronicles a 2021 expedition that left five dead, when mountaineers John Snorri Sigurjónsson, an Icelander, and Pakistani father-son team Ali and Sajid Sadpara were joined by “influencer climbers and their film crews, commercial expedition clients, and Nims, a Nepalese celebrity mountaineer, and his team of Sherpas.”
All of that documentation of the climb ended up being hugely helpful for Bar-Lev, as he told TheWrap’s Sharon Waxman at the Sundance Film Festival.
“We got involved a few years after it happened. And part of what the film is about is the fact that there were so many cameras on the mountain, we didn’t need to necessarily have been there,” Bar-Lev explained. “We did interviews, but part of the job was my excellent archive team contacted many of the 60 people that were there and licensed their footage. And it’s a facet of mountaineering today that, as one interviewee says to us, these days you bring your chef, your Sherpa team and your videographer. A thematic element of this film is we are living in an age where everything is documented, everything is filmed, much of it is posted, and mountaineering is no exception. And it’s having an effect on the culture of mountaineering, as it’s having an effect on our culture at large.”
While Bar-Lev is not a climber himself, he said he was drawn to the subject matter for its cinematic possibilities.
“I think adrenaline is the low hanging fruit with storytelling. It’s not a bad thing but I wouldn’t have found this interesting if it was just a riveting story of survival and competition, which it is. But for me, what’s interesting about it is as alien as the landscape is, you bring yourself to the mountains, almost like a science fiction story,” said Bar-Lev. “Humans bring their strengths and weaknesses wherever they go and this story was no exception. A lot of what’s interesting to me in this story is that it’s a snapshot of humanity today. There’s the cameras, the social media, but it’s also an Alpine racial reckoning. There’s a father son story that’s quite moving. There’s a bromance, there’s a love story, and also it’s a story about risk. For me, it’s a story about risk.”
Bar-Lev said that he references another movie in his house when referring to his kids – Pixar’s masterpiece “WALL•E.” “That’s a shorthand in my house between my wife and I about being concerned that our kids live such a cosseted life and whether they should test themselves – that they may not be experiencing the real whatever it is,” Bar-Lev said.
That real experience, outside of what he refers to as “WALL•E World,” referencing the luxury cruise ship where humanity finds itself in the future, is what he is chasing in “The Last First: Winter K2” and undoubtedly what some of those climbers were after too.
