Director – Lucy Walker – 2023 – US – Cert. 12a – 103m
***1/2
A Sherpa woman climbs Everest ten times and escapes an abusive marriage to one of her fellow climbers – out in UK cinemas on Friday, July 26th and on Netflix from Wednesday, July 31st
Amazing what you can learn from documentary movies. From this one, I learned that all of Nepal’s Sherpa people have the same surname: Sherpa. One of them, a woman named Lhakpa Sherpa, had always wanted to climb Mount Everest. A series of meetings led her to the Nepalese Prime Minister, who, impressed with her determination, put her in charge of a year 2000 expedition to conquer the summit. Unfortunately, she was not the greatest of leaders, preferring to go on ahead at her own pace. Many of her fellow climbers gave up or returned to camp, but she kept going and became the first woman to both make it to the Summit and return alive.
Bitten by the Everest-scaling bug, she went back on her own the following year and did it again. This time, she went with a Romanian climber named Gheorghe Dijmărescu, who she had met the previous year. A romance ensued, and she went back with him to Connecticut and had a child by him before the couple married in 2002. She learned to speak his language, believing it to be American, then learned to speak American English as well. In 2003, she scaled the summit with her brother and sister, becoming the first siblings ever to do so.
She herself went back and reached the summit again for the next three years. On the 2004 trip, her husband drank considerable quantities of whisky with fellow Romanians and became violent, revealing a whole hitherto unknown side to himself. Journalist Michael Kodas, embedded with the climbers to write despatches for a local Connecticut paper, sent back pieces portraying Dijmărescu in a less than favourable light; when the latter went online and read them, the situation got ugly. Lhakpa put up with his physical abuse for 12 years, but when he hospitalised her in 2012, she left him, spending eight months in a refuge with her three kids.
The couple’s custody trial for the kids was marked by his constant interruption of the judge and his complaint that the children’s mother wasn’t capable of raising them because of her illiteracy. This didn’t go well for him, since the judge too had been raised by an illiterate parent, and Lhakpa got full custody. He died of cancer in 2020, with Lhakpa speaking to him by telephone some two weeks before he passed.
Their first child Sunny internalised much of the abuse, refusing to speak words to her mother for what appears in the documentary to be several years. Her other daughter Shiny coped with it much better, but the film contains a harrowing if brief description of the violent incident that put Lhakpa in the hospital. She supported her kids by working in a branch of Whole Foods where people were unaware of her mountaineering achievements. After scaling Everest a tenth time in 2022, she received the Tensing Norgay Award, a meeting after the ceremony for which resulted in a sponsor backing her to do anything she wanted. She promptly went and climbed K2.
This is a bit of a plod at the beginning, but it picks up as it goes along and by the end, is a hugely inspiring story of a woman achieving the incredible. I found myself swept along by it – and I’m a man, so I imagine women would find it more inspiring still. It may not be the greatest documentary ever made, but it does the job it sets out to do and is certainly worth a watch on the Netflix small screen.
Mountain Queen: The Summits of Lhakpa Sherpa is out in UK cinemas on Friday, July 26th and on Netflix from Wednesday, July 31st.
Trailer: