'Collaboration, co-operation & connection': AppleTV's Tenzing reframes conquest of Mount Everest

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Director Jennifer Peedom’s biographical drama Tenzing reframes the 1953 conquest of Mount Everest as a story of spiritual purpose, equality and friendship between two outsiders.

More than seven decades after Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay first summited Mount Everest, their achievement is still fixed in the popular imagination. But in this film streaming on AppleTV now, Peedom pulls back on that familiar image of the pair atop Everest (8,848.86 metres) and delivers the origin story of Norgay, a Himalayan climber whose name was too often placed second behind Hillary’s.

Played as an adult by Chinese actor of Tibetan decent Genden Phuntsok, Norgay is introduced not as a supporting figure in a British triumph but as a man pursuing a lifelong calling. The film, filled with all the grandeur and danger of a mountain epic, follows him from childhood in a sacred Tibetan valley through years of expedition work, family life, grief and repeated attempts on Everest, or as Tibetans call her, Chomolungma “mother goddess.”

For Phuntsok, the importance of the film is the view it offers. Earlier Everest stories have largely arrived through a Western lens; Tenzing places Tibetan and Sherpa experiences and culture at the centre.

“I think this movie shows all the world Tenzing’s perspective,” said Phuntsok. “There no movie just telling the Sherpa people’s perspective and from Tenzing’s perspective.”

Peedom, who came to the story well versed in the topic after making the 2015 documentary Sherpa, structures the story through flashbacks and flash-forwards, with Samdrup Dorje Lama playing Tenzing as a boy, Tenzin Dalha as a young man, and Phuntsok carrying the role through the final ascent. This approach delivers the weight of an entire life.

In the film, Norgay is treated as an outsider by other kids, Sherpa and the climbing teams he joins. But Norgay refuses to define himself that way.

“(The outsider), that is not a big problem. It’s how you think about yourself, and wherever you go, like Tenzing, you will belong to that location,” said Phuntsok as he compared Norgay to an animal that travels in Norgay’s part of the world. “Tenzing, like a snow leopard, who climbs every snow mountain around the Himalaya ridges, belonged to the snow mountains.

“Sometimes, he felt alone and he was treated like an outsider, but I think he depends on himself, his spirit. And I think it is a really important spirit.”

Phuntsok hopes the narrative of inner belonging will speak to viewers who feel isolated. Norgay’s example, he suggests, is not that barriers disappear, but that a person can keep moving through them without accepting someone else’s definition of who they are or where they belong.

“I really hope the Tenzing movie can give them encouragement,” said Phuntsok. “You are not alone. Your spirit is always with you … and, one day, you will get to where you want to get.”

The spiritual aspect of Norgay’s story is central to the film. To Western climbers, Everest is something to be conquered, a prize to win. To Norgay, the ascent is an intimate and reverential pilgrimage shaped by memory, belief and belonging.

Peedom’s film also exposes the class and cultural hierarchy embedded in early Himalayan expeditions.

Sherpas carry equipment, set up camps, guide teams and cut routes through the ice, all while shouldering much of the risk and receiving little of the glory.

Norgay wants something different.

When British Colonel John Hunt, played by Willem Dafoe, offers Norgay the position of head Sherpa for the 1953 expedition, Norgay refuses. He wants a place on the climbing team.

After people push Norgay’s case, and Hillary reminds Hunt that Norgay had already gone higher on Everest than almost anyone alive, Hunt relents and puts Norgay on the climbing team.

Hillary, played by Tom Hiidleston, enters that journey as another outsider, a New Zealander on a British expedition. The partnership between Norgay and Hillary becomes the film’s emotional centre.

What united Tenzing and Hillary, Hiddleston says, “overwhelmingly outweighed” their differences. They trusted one another with their lives.

“I think what’s extraordinary about the story of Tenzing and Hillary is that they really were so different in terms of the circumstances of their lives, and their journeys to that moment on the mountain in May of 1953 are radically different,” said Hiddleston. “But they were bonded by a shared love of nature, a deep passion for the mountain, a mutual respect for the other’s skill and experience, and in the end, they were united by all that they shared.

“When they came down the mountain, they came down as a pair,” added Hiddleston. “They held each other’s lives in their hands and achieved the impossible together. It’s very inspiring.”

While Hillary and Norgay’s partnership becomes the axis of the expedition, Hiddleston describes the 1953 ascent as a story of “collaboration, cooperation and connection,” borrowing Hillary’s image of the expedition as a “pyramid of effort.”

“The base of it was wide,” said Hiddleston. “The was the achievement of a team who had committed themselves with every fibre of their being, heart, body, and soul, to achieve this impossible dream in giving a nod to the broad base of people that were committed to this incredible accomplishment.”

Shot without green screen across Nepal and New Zealand, using stunning high-altitude landscapes including Himalayan settings in Nepal and alpine terrain around Aoraki/Mount Cook, The Remarkables mountain range and Mount Head in New Zealand, the film delivers a mountain that feels beautiful, lethal and sacred. And, in using the great outdoors, it delivers very realistic and incredibly suspenseful climbing sequences, despite the outcome being well known.

Hillary’s and Norgay’s summit of the world’s highest peak was celebrated as one of the 20th century’s defining achievements, but Tenzing the film goes beyond that feat and asks audiences to see more than the outcome. To also understand the hierarchy that nearly kept one of the world’s finest climbers off the team, the families left waiting below and the “pyramid of effort,” beneath the legend.

But mostly, the film rightly restores Tenzing Norgay to the centre of his own history. Tenzing opens in select theatres Oct. 9 and premieres globally on Apple TV Oct. 16.