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Tenzing Norgay was the first person to summit Mount Everest alongside Edmund Hillary. The Apple Original film “Tenzing,” opening Zurich Film Festival, reframes the story of that first ascent.
“It’s often reduced to a
familiar shorthand: Hillary conquered Everest, assisted by a Sherpa. But Tenzing had more experience on Everest than anyone else on that 1953 expedition. He wasn’t just helping another man achieve his dream. He had his own dream,” says director Jennifer Peedom.
“The ambition was to restore that subjectivity and allow him to be the protagonist of his own life, not a supporting character in someone else’s heroic story. Importantly, this doesn’t require diminishing Hillary. I think their partnership becomes much more interesting when you understand the stature of both men and what each brought to that rope.”
Genden Phuntsok stars, joined by Tom Hiddleston as Hillary, Thinley Lhamo, Caitríona Balfe and Willem Dafoe, who plays Colonel John Hunt.
“I needed someone with tremendous emotional depth, physical strength, warmth and humor, but also a kind of quiet authority. Tenzing is not a character who announces everything he’s feeling, so I needed an actor who could carry a lot internally,” recalls Peedom, adding that Phuntsok was “completely fearless.”
“He has this extraordinary, contained force. Culturally, there were things he understood because he grew up on the Tibetan Plateau, at altitude, in a landscape and culture with real connections to Tenzing’s own world.”
She adds: “It was wonderful to see actors with very different histories and methods – Genden, Tom and Willem – meet each other as equals inside the world of the film.”
Peedom was struck by Tenzing’s journey – even before Everest.
“We tend to focus on the final achievement, but the obstacles he had to overcome just to get to the starting line were immense,” she notes.
He first tried to join an exhibition in 1933 and finally got his first opportunity in 1935, initially as a porter. Over the next two decades, he built his experience and reputation until, by 1953, he was one of the most experienced Everest mountaineers in the world.
“I found that incredibly moving in my research. He wasn’t a man who was given an opportunity and then proved himself on the mountain. He had to fight for the opportunity in the first place.”
Peedom is well aware that, for the longest time, the achievements of the Sherpas were completely ignored. She made a short “The Sherpas’ Burden” and feature doc “Sherpa.”
“In a sense, ‘Tenzing’ is another chapter in the same exploration. What happens when you move the person who has traditionally been at the edge of the frame into the center of the story?”
In the past, she was “struck by this extraordinary imbalance.”
“The Sherpas did much of the essential work: carrying loads, fixing ropes, setting up camps and making repeated journeys through some of the most dangerous terrain. When something went wrong, they were often the ones who went back up to rescue others. Yet the heroic narrative still tended to belong to the Western climber,” she stresses.
“These were elite mountaineers, often with multiple Everest summits [under their belts], doing some of the most dangerous and skilled work. Yet, outside of Nepal, almost nobody knew their names.”
Celebrated for her documentaries, Peedom felt that this time, the story demanded something else.
“So much of Tenzing’s journey is internal. It’s about faith, family, ambition and identity, and private moments for which no camera was present. Documentary could tell me what happened, and I had spent years gathering that history, but drama allowed us to get closer to what those experiences might have felt like,” she says.
“I didn’t want to portray Tenzing from the outside. I wanted the audience to experience the expedition from his perspective. I wanted them to understand what was at stake for him personally and how it felt to enter this very British world while carrying an entirely different relationship to the mountain.”
His is a spiritual journey, too.
“Very much so. Tenzing was Buddhist, and the mountain had spiritual meaning for him. As a boy, he herded his father’s yaks on the Tibetan high plateau beneath Everest. I think the journey was, in some sense, a journey home,” notes Peedom.
When he finally reached the summit, he prayed and left offerings there.
“In many Western mountaineering stories, the mountain is an adversary, something to defeat or conquer. For Tenzing, the relationship was much more complex. There was ambition, certainly. But there was also reverence.”
Peedom’s film tackles complicated questions around identity.
“I’m not sure I would say he never belonged anywhere. He belonged very deeply to his family, his faith and the Himalayan world he came from. But after Everest, his identity became politicized, and different countries wanted to claim him,” she says. However, the film ends before all that begins.
“We leave him coming back down the mountain before the fame and politics take hold. There’s something very poignant about that moment. He has finally achieved this thing he has dreamed about and worked towards for so many years, and for that brief moment, the achievement simply belongs to him.”
Peedom spent more than 20 years around mountaineers. When asked about what drives them, she’s not sure if there’s only one answer.
“People climb for completely different reasons. What I do understand better is the extraordinary clarity that extreme environments can provide. Everything extraneous falls away. A breath matters. A decision matters. The person on the other end of the rope matters. You become intensely present in a way that ordinary life rarely demands,” she says.
“I understand that pull better now, but I don’t think you can ever fully explain it. Perhaps that mystery is part of the attraction.”
