By: Jonah Lazar, Staff Writer
Content warning: mentions of death.
The Vancouver International Mountain Film Festival, or the VIMFF, has returned to the city for their spring festivities prior to taking the celebration on the road across Canada and the US. The festival spanned two weeks across a host of different cinemas, with each night focusing on different subject matters related to mountain sports.
I attended the Extreme Ascents showing, expecting an evening of lighthearted, picturesque short films about mountain climbing, as this had been the motif when I attended last October. The North American premiere of the short film K2 Mon Amour, which detailed a French couple’s attempt to paraglide off the second-highest peak on Earth, fulfilled that expectation. Anna, a short memoir about mountaineer Anna Pfaff’s battle with frostbite on the peaks of Alaska, was also screened. However, this night took a darker turn due to the keynote presentation by alpinist and filmmaker Elia Saikaly.
Saikaly has had a 20-year career climbing and filming in the Himalayas — a career which has included five ascents of Everest. While this extensive career in the mountain climbing world has surely provided him with a host of positive, uplifting stories from the mountains, the focus of this presentation was not to sugarcoat the world’s highest points. In this career climbing Everest, Saikaly has witnessed the death of countless Sherpas (an ethnic group native to the Himalayas who have long worked as guides for Himalayan expeditions) and climbers. Deaths, in his mind, which often could have been preventable.
Everest’s overcrowding crisis often captures international media attention, with sensationalized photos of lineups of climbers snaking their way up towards the summit, and climbers dying of hypothermia as others eager to reach the top pass them by. Saikaly argued that this crisis is far more nuanced than a simple case of traffic. Instead, Saikaly alluded to the blood being on the Nepalese government’s hands, as they have been giving inexperienced tour guides permission to lead expeditions up Everest — putting themselves and their clients in significant danger. “Traffic revealed the fault lines in the leadership,” he stated, before pointing to a photo of his friend Nihal Bagwan, who died during his descent after summiting Everest, and whose body Saikaly recovered later.
Saikaly continued along this vein of death to explain that death is an integral part of the Everest experience, in that it creates an aura of danger and uncertainty around the mountain that helps maintain its notoriety among mountaineers. Through examples of bodies being filmed for internet fame by climbers and expedition leaders laughing at the deaths of their coworkers, he showed that a harrowing desensitization to death has plagued the Everest community.
This presentation felt like a breath of fresh air for having not brushed aside death in the mountains as an inescapable fate for those who don’t make it back to base camp.
The mountaineering community, at times, seems to pride itself on the risks associated, and Saikaly’s insight and humanity provided a much-needed critical analysis as to why these deaths are so often overlooked.
To conclude his presentation, Saikaly reflected on the need for accountability when deaths occur on Everest, and the need for consequences for those who play a part in causing or allowing for the deaths of climbers on the world’s tallest mountain.
