Queen of the Mountains: The Peak of Lakpa Sherpa Review: Netflix Doc

Lhakpa Sherpa holds the world record for most Everest summits by a woman, with 10 summits, but she conquered more than just mountains. Lucy Walker’s Queen of Mountains: The Summit of Lakhpa Sherpa Includes dizzying footage of Rabah on Mount Everest, sometimes in snow and high winds. But the life of this charming, humble, determined woman is the real focus. Her story captures the tenacity that made all these climbs possible. She grew up in a village in Nepal, where she was uneducated and illiterate, and made her mark in the mountains before making her way out while climbing in the mountains. She managed to leave that marriage as a physically abusive wife and mother.

Walker takes a hands-off approach to her subject, as she has done in previous films, including the Oscar-nominated wasteland (2010), about creating art from trash heaps, and blindsight (2006), about a blind climber in Tibet. She found in Raba a dynamic personality who exuded warmth and candor, reflected on the past, was humble but proud of her achievements.

Her English grammar may be patchy, but Lakba’s way of describing things is colorful and sometimes even poetic. During a recent climb in 2022, she stood on Mount Everest with a sunburned face and said she felt dirty and smelly, comparing herself to a “dirty cat” rummaging through trash in Hartford, Connecticut. Old Raccoon,” where she lived for more than 20 years.

The film begins in Connecticut in 2022 as she prepares for her tenth climb. Her 15-year-old daughter Shiny will travel to Nepal with her, but 19-year-old Sunny, a withdrawn who barely talks to her family, chooses to stay. As the film recounts this journey, it is intertwined with Lakpa’s narrative, often in an interview in which she speaks to a silent, unseen interviewer.

During that interview, she uncharacteristically wore traditional Nepali clothing, a choice that seemed carefully designed and sartorially styled but also positioned her as a cultural icon. Her story is told through archival footage, including some from previous expeditions and interviews conducted over the years, as she continued to break her own record for the most climbs by a woman. But Walker and her editors create a compelling narrative so the film never quite comes together as it actually does.

Some footage shows her ascent, including recent high-altitude photography by Matthew Owen. Laba sometimes used a narrow ladder to cross the cracks, sometimes climbing in the dark of night. (An EPK about how they took these photos would be interesting.) Meanwhile, Shiny waits at base camp, worried that her mother may have run out of oxygen at the camp above because the weather has delayed her progress by a few days.

Lakpa’s many climbs form a through line in the film, but as she tells her story, the details of her climbs are kept to a minimum. As a girl living in a village where almost everyone had the surname Sherpa, she carried her younger brother to school for two hours every day but was not allowed inside. She disguised herself as a man and started working as a porter for an expedition with the goal of rock climbing. This personal story offers the most honest and poignant moments.

In 2000, she became the first woman to climb Mount Everest and return successfully. In an archival interview at the time, she admitted that she had fathered a child with a man who cheated on her with many other women. She then puts her head in her hands and turns away from the camera, as if she has internalized all the shame society has placed on her.

Walker organizes the documentary so that we can watch Lakpa’s slow awakening to her own agency. Shortly after her first Everest victory, she met Romanian climber George Dijmarescu, married him and moved to Hartford, where they had a daughter and served as Everest Wizard. The experience of their 2004 expedition is the most painful part of the film.

Michael Kodas Reporter The Hartford Courant One of the few talking heads in the film, one of the group they guided, wrote in a column on The Hill that Dimarescu became angry and violent. Lakpa said of George in her typically vivid way, “He looked like bad weather, he looked like thunder, he looked like bullets.” He beat her until she lost consciousness. Kordas included a photo of her swollen face in her 2009 book about Everest. High Crime: The Fate of Everest in the Age of Greed. “I wish I had the ability to put this picture out. I’m ashamed,” Lakpa said.

But she still insisted on the marriage because she had no money and no power. “George took away my power,” she said. He eventually beat her so severely in front of the children that she was admitted to the hospital, where a social worker helped them get to a shelter. She divorced George, took care of her daughter, and continued climbing. “Everest is my doctor. Repairs my soul,” she said.

Walker’s respect for Laba’s privacy was almost excessive. There are brief glimpses of the beginnings of her adult son (the first child), but his story is largely absent. A friend vaguely tells Lakpa and Shiny about George’s troubled childhood, causing Shiny to cry. But we don’t know how true George, who died of cancer in 2020, felt about it.

Those disparities haven’t affected Lakpa’s vivid on-screen persona or the example she says she hopes to set for other women. Even sullen daughter Sunny says by the end that she knows how to turn the childhood trauma she suffered in an abusive home into strength, and that’s the lesson Lakpa embodies in this engaging documentary.