Lhakpa Sherpa isn’t yet a household name but is likely to become one after Mountain Queen: The Summits of Lhakpa Sherpa, (Lucy Walker’s new feature documentary about her) goes out on Netflix on 192 countries in July. “It is going to be the first ever movie that Netflix has subtitled in Nepali – which is huge…” the Oscar-nominated director notes. The film has its European premiere June 16 at Sheffield DocFest.
Lhakpa is the only woman to have climbed Everest 10 times. The Nepalese mountaineer, now based in Connecticut, has had to overcome huge challenges throughout her life. As a kid, she was denied education. Only the males in her family went to school. (She used to carry her brother to the school gates.) Her mountaineering career began when she worked as a porter, “a kitchen boy.” She then somehow persuaded the Prime Minister to back an all-women Nepali ascent of Everest – she was leader of the team and the only one who didn’t turn back.
For many years, Lhakpa suffered domestic abuse at the hands of a violent and alcoholic husband. Throughout her life, she has been hurt badly and often made to feel like “a small mouse” but when she is on the mountains, she turns into a superhero.
On the morning of the June 15 Sheffield Doc Fest European premiere. Lhakpa and Walker went on a hike in the Peak District.
“It was a scramble, moderate intensity, but it was really delightful just to accompany Lhakpa,” Walker says of their jaunt along the Bamford Edge, admiring the sheep, the trees and the magnificent views.
This isn’t Walker’s first mountaineering movie. Her award-winning 2006 documentary Blindsight followed six blind Tibetan teenagers climbing in the Himalayas.
“I am always looking for stories that I think have the ability to make exceptional documentary films that people are going to be really excited to watch,” Walker states.
Before work on Mountain Queen began, Lhakpa’s daughter Sunny vetted Walker, checking out her earlier documentaries and telling her mother this was a filmmaker she could trust. It helped that Walker could already speak a little Tibetan and had climbed on Everest herself.
“She cried. I cried,” Walker recalls of their first conversation.
Mountain Queen has some remarkable, often very raw, footage of Lhakpa’s expeditions including material from an ill-fated 2004 expedition when her husband Gheorghe Dijmărescu bullied and assaulted her. This trip was written about in unflattering terms by author and expedition member Michael Kodas, who appears as an interviewee here.
The director talks about her “Herculean effort to gather the material to tell the back story.” Walker was also determined to film her own footage of Lhakpa climbing Everest. “I knew the audiences would be so thrilled if they actually got to see her in action.”
For all her prowess, Lhakpa has had made little money. Sponsors have largely shunned her, even as they have thrown money and support behind far less talented Western climbers.
“She’s not a Norwegian pin-up with a huge Instagram following,” Walker points out. Lhakpa may be “unbelievably smart” and speak multiple languages including Sherpa. Nepalese, English and Hindi but she can’t read or write and no-one is “running up” to give her money.
The film doesn’t “shy away from the pain and violence of the reality of this story.” Nonetheless, it is also uplifting and inspirational. Nepal is one of the poorest countries in the world. Lhakpa has had next to no resources and yet has continued to break record after record.
“I always knew that I wanted the story to be two things. The Everest climb, because look at Free Solo,Touching The Void. Audiences love mountain movies. They get eyeballs, they’re exciting. There’s an in-built narrative…but I also knew I wanted that back story of her life,” Walker sums up her twin ambitions for the documentary. Above all, she wanted, to “put something riveting on the screen.”
The film includes an extended interview with Lhakpa in which the climber is shown sitting in traditional costume in her brother’s house in Kathmandu answering Walker’s most probing questions.
“I wanted to go deep with her,” Walker observes of this interview. “It was exciting. She really lit up when she was staying in that house…it was the first time I had seen her in that context. In Connecticut, they share this tiny, tiny two-bedroom apartment, the three of them [Lhakpa and her daughters]. She is in her Whole Foods outfit. It’s incredibly modest and cramped, cheap generic America. And yet her cultural magnificence really sprang to life when were got to Kathmandu.”
Walker knew it would be “really tough” for Lhakpa to discuss aspects of her life on camera about which she still feels shame. However, in her brother’s house, she is fully at ease. The interview was shot over a period of three days. The director steered her into talking about the most difficult moments in her life – but always doing so from a position of strength, not victimhood. “It was a real journey she went on with trusting me. It really helped that I had a lot of experience and am quite trauma-informed.”
Mountain Queen was financed by Sidney Kimmel’s SK Global and acquired by Netflix after its Toronto International Film Festival premiere last autumn.
Feature docs have been struggling since the pandemic but this is one which has attracted backers from the start. “I was very confident with this film, because I knew how special it was, that we could sell it and find a great distributor,” the director says about a film that has already won plaudits wherever it has shown. “Her [Lhakpa’s] mission was always to show people what women and girls were capable of. And, gosh, has she accomplished even more than she dreamed…”
After screening this weekend at Sheffield DocFest (second screening June 16), Mountain Queen has a one-off screening Monday 17 June at Bertha DocHouse Curzon Bloomsbury. which will be introduced by director Lucy Walker and Lhakpa Sherpa.
