The True Story of Tragedy and Perseverance Behind Everest: The Other Side
Time · Barry Levitt ·
When tragedy struck during the filming of a mountaineering documentary, the filmmakers and subject faced a decision about whether to continue.
Mount Everest is the largest mountain in the world. It’s estimated that more than 7,500 people have stood on its peak, reaching an astonishing 29,031 feet above sea level in Nepal, typically climbing up the mountain’s south side. But Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin’s documentary Everest: The Other Side shifts focus to the mountain’s north face. It is here that two people, ski mountaineers Jim Morrison and Hilaree Nelson, attempted to do something that no human being had done before.
Morrison and Nelson met in 2015 on an expedition to Makalu, the world’s fifth-highest mountain, in the Mahalangur Himalayas. The pair developed a friendship before beginning a romantic relationship in 2017, bonding over their shared sense of adventure. “There’s a connection I don’t feel anywhere else…I love how it makes me feel alive,” Nelson says about ski mountaineering in the new film, which hit theaters on Oct. 30 following its premiere at the Venice Film Festival. Together, Morrison and Nelson conceived a plan: They would climb to the top of Everest’s north face, and once they’d reached the summit, become the first to ski down it. It was the ultimate proposal for a pair of adventurous thrill-seekers, but one wrong move could result in disaster. They never got the chance to take the risk together, though: Disaster struck before they embarked on the journey, a tragedy the directors capture in devastating detail in the new film.
Vasarhelyi and Chin are drawn to stories of people who accomplish extraordinary things, and they set out to capture them in a manner that fully captures their feats, like in Free Solo, Meru, and The Rescue. Everest: The Other Side is playing in both regular format and IMAX cinemas, the latter of which takes particular advantage of the breathtaking shots the filmmakers were able to capture, offering a sense of how epic Everest is, and how dangerous.