A Nepali climber rises again in ‘Mountain Queen: The Summits of Lhakpa Sherpa’

The term “Sherpa” is often associated with mountainous climbing guides—like Tenzing Norgay, who accompanied Edmund Hillary when they became the first people to reach Everest’s peak. It’s also the last name of everyone in Lhakpa’s childhood village, referring to an ethno-geographic group for whom the Himalayan mountains are sacred. Lhakpa is as much a guide to others as she is a climber in her own right, searching for answers atop perilous peaks. The documentary by multiple-time Oscar nominee Lucy Walker is awash in these cultural specifics as they pertain to Lhakpa—whose name means “Wednesday,” after the day she was born, as is the local tradition—but it also unearths the challenges she faced as a woman denied an education. Walker takes an oblique narrative approach to presenting these details, essentially telling Lhakpa's story through "flashbacks," constructed not only from sit-down interviews, but from old videos shot more than 20 years ago.

The film, for the most part, follows Lhakpa flying back to Nepal with one of her daughters—the younger one, named Shiny—to begin her climb, while her older daughter Sunny stays behind. Sunny is upset by the lack of communication between the family about her late father, and she's skeptical of what her mother even means when she says she wants to “make things better” by scaling the world's tallest mountain.

It's a question that hangs over the movie, but one it answers slowly but surely across its 111 minutes, that too in surprising fashion. On one hand, Lhakpa's literal meaning isn't hard to discern. As the first woman to successfully summit and return from Everest’s peak—not just once, but nine times over—a record-breaking climb is sure to bring media attention and potential sponsorship, so there's certainly money involved. On the other hand, Lhakpa displays a general dissatisfaction and malaise in her daily life, which she believes only the climb will cure. To anyone outside the community of guides and climbing enthusiasts—and really, to anyone who isn't Lhakpa herself—this mystery seems impenetrable, but it's one Walker is determined to solve.

By framing Lhakpa's entire life, from her achievements to her complicated marriage, against the mountain itself, Walker casts Everest as a point of dramatic inflection. This is entirely in keeping with the way Lhakpa views the towering feat of nature: the way she refers to it shifts depending on what part of her life she recalls for the camera. Sometimes she calls it "Chomolungma," its Tibetan name, which means "Goddess mother of the world." There's a sense of holiness to it, a spiritual reverence that Walker captures when she first introduces its slopes from behind a foggy mist, as though it were emerging with intention, and demanding to be seen. On other occasions, Lhakpa refers to Everest as a game, an old friend, and even a doctor—a therapist of sorts, upon whom she can project her woes, and receive some kind of answer in return.

The more we learn about Lhakpa's past, from the cultural hurdles of her upbringing to her various relationships, the more this 10th summit starts to matter. It feels not only risky, but urgent, as though her life—her very being—depends on it. Through archival footage, Walker brings Lhakpa's memories to life, matching each anecdote with a fitting home video or a filmed sliver of mountain adventure, shot either by friends Lhakpa made over the years, or by her late husband George, a Romanian American mountain guide with a complex past. Alongside Everest, George is perhaps the film's most towering presence, despite his absence from Lhakpa and their daughters’ lives. The more that comes to light about him, the more it makes sense that Lhakpa might not want to share stories about him with their kids, but his impact on all three of them is an albatross around their necks.

Since George and Lhakpa met at the foot of Everest, and climbed it together numerous times, he and the summit feel inextricably bound. Lhakpa, though she's bubbly and snappy when she speaks, reveals just as much by what she withholds. During interviews, Walker doesn’t force answers out of her on difficult personal topics, but rather, the filmmaker suggests these emotional possibilities through montage—courtesy of editors Tyler Temple Higgins, Yaniv Elani, and Davon Ramos—and creates a wonderfully dynamic psychology and inner life for her subject. She studies Lhakpa like a layered fictional character, but always maintains a sense of awareness that she's a real person, made of flesh and blood, and who carries her most painful experiences with her.

At times when Lhakpa's command of English may not be sufficient to explain her thorny feelings about George, Walker assists, punctuating old footage and constructed "flashbacks" with wildly impactful sounds, of children playing, or couples arguing, as if these bits of memory had broken through the interviews and old videos. The film makes Lhakpa's lived experiences feel as vivid and alive as any moment in her present.

Assisted by Michael Stearns Nikolaj Hess' rousing score, it endears the viewer to an utterly fascinating woman, not just by painting a picture of her upbringing, but by letting her speak, and assisting her in telling her own story. The picture that emerges, from behind the thick fog of lifelong defeat and repression, is one of resilience, and one that bucks the trend of most mawkish inspirational stories that focus on the "power of the human spirit" in the broadest possible strokes. Instead, Mountain Queen: The Summits of Lhakpa Sherpa is hyper-specific about who is doing the inspiring (and why), as well as who is in most need of inspiration: not only Lhakpa's disillusioned daughters, but Lhakpa herself, as though the world's tallest peak were merely a metaphor—a beast of nature that could be tamed through emotional triumph.