Panaji, You can’t even reach Everest Base Camp, let alone the summit, without the guidance of Sherpas, says actor Manisha Koirala, who is glad the community is getting its due on screen.
Koirala, who was born in Nepal, said she often feels “terrified” by the dreary lives of Sherpas, who mostly serve as guides for climbers hoping to scale the world’s highest peaks at extreme altitudes in the Himalayan region.
She was speaking during a conversation with English documentary filmmaker Lucy Walker and veteran filmmaker Shekhar Kapur at the International Film Festival of India here.
“I hiked to the base camp. I realized the value of Sherpas because it is impossible to even go to base camp without them. You need their guidance and wisdom. Their livelihood is so sad that I feel terrible,” Koirala said on Saturday.
The actor praised Walker for her 2023 documentary Queen of the Mountains: Lhakpa Sherpa Peaks for showcasing the Sherpas.
“Now there are a lot of people supporting the Sherpa community and being recognized by so many people like her. Other people also talk about them,” she said.
Sherpas are the ones who “create ladders” to climb mountains, Kapur added.
“The Sherpas are the ones who go out at three in the morning and make ropes, and then everyone who paid $40,000, $50,000 reaches out and says, ‘Hey, we went to Everest.’ No, someone pulled you like a Sherpa, right?” said the director.
Walker said Bollywood and Hollywood films are “fantastic” but often tell the same story, adding that viewers can sometimes learn about real life in a documentary.
“When you watch real life, sometimes you can see a new story with new characters,” she added.
Walker is also known for such acclaimed documentaries as 2006’s “Blindsight,” which follows six Tibetan teenagers on their journey up the 23,000-foot Lhakpa Ri in the shadow of Mount Everest, and “Waste Land,” a 2010 film about a bustling group of workers , who salvage recyclable materials from the trash to create contemporary art.
“With documentaries, you have the opportunity to introduce viewers to people they’ve never met in real life and may not have had the opportunity to meet. But they get a chance to meet someone outside of their comfort zone… That’s how the world gains more understanding, and that’s how we expand our circle of empathy,” she said.
Walker also said that she and Kapoor had discussed creating a project that would be like “turning” Danny Boyle’s award-winning feature film Slumdog Millionaire into a documentary by taking cameras to people in Dharavi, Asia’s largest slum.
“We wanted kids in Dharavi to make a film, write a film and star in it. We wanted to capture how they make the film, how they handle the whole process. So we have a documentary about how they make a feature film. and then we could release a feature film,” explained Kapoor, who serves as IFFI’s festival director.
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