BY STEVE MARTINDALE
Salt Spring Film Festival Society
Salt Spring Search and Rescue joins the Salt Spring Film Festival at ArtSpring on Wednesday, Jan. 21 to present the award-winning documentary Everest Dark, depicting the breathtaking beauty of Mount Everest through the eyes of the Sherpa people who worship the mountain as Chomolungma, the sacred Mother Goddess of the World.
Everest has become a frozen graveyard in the seven decades since Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay first summited the world’s highest peak, with over 200 bodies trapped in ice and snow — one third of them Sherpas. When 15 more climbers perished in traffic jams in 2019, the Sherpas became convinced that the mountain was angry for having been further desecrated.
As climate change reveals the location of some of the previously missing human remains, Everest Dark follows national hero Mingma Tsiri Sherpa — considered one of the best high-altitude climbers of all time — as he leads an elite team of fellow Sherpas in an audacious attempt to pacify the mountain by retrieving one frozen body at a time from Everest’s unpredictable and hostile Death Zone, so that they can be repatriated and laid to rest.
With over 20 years of experience making films in some of the world’s most unforgiving environments, B.C. filmmaker Jereme Watt was named Best Director at the Montreal International Film Festival for Everest Dark, which was also named Best Canadian Feature at Toronto’s Planet in Focus International Film Festival and Best Film on Mountain Culture at the New Zealand Mountain Film and Book Festival.
The Best of the Fests series continues on Feb. 11 at ArtSpring with the provocative documentary Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore, about the deaf actor whose breakout performance in the 1986 film Children of a Lesser God earned her an Academy Award, followed by the annual Salt Spring Film Festival at Gulf Islands Secondary School from Feb. 27 to March 1.