Climbers filmed themselves on a Himalayan wall that beat over 20 teams

Meru premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on 23 January 2015, and it is a climbing documentary shot by the climbers themselves on a Himalayan wall that had beaten over 20 teams before them. It won the festival's U.S. Documentary Audience Award that year, and its directors went on to win an Oscar with their next climbing film.

The story follows a team of three American climbers and one granite wall. Conrad Anker, a veteran alpinist, Jimmy Chin, a mountaineer and photographer, and Renan Ozturk, a climber and cinematographer, set out to climb the Shark's Fin, the north-west face of Meru Peak in India's Garhwal Himalayas. Nobody had finished the route. The film follows their failed attempt in 2008, the years in between and the return in 2011.

It is also a film about what a mountain costs the people who go back. That is a large part of why it reached viewers who never watch climbing movies, which is what Chin said he hoped for.

Why had nobody climbed it?

Before 2011, Alpinist described more than two dozen attempts on the Shark's Fin by elite climbers, all of them failures. Anker first tried the route in 2003, with Doug Chabot and Bruce Miller, and they turned back about two-thirds of the way up. The 2011 climb was his third attempt.

The wall is the problem. Climbers on Meru carry about 200 pounds of gear, because there are no Sherpas to haul loads. In 2008 a storm that dropped six feet of snow pinned the three on the wall. They rationed their food, and after close to three weeks they stopped about 150 meters below the summit, according to Alpinist.

What did it cost to go back?

Between the trips, things happened that a screenwriter would be told to tone down. About five months before the 2011 return, Ozturk nearly died in a skiing accident in the Tetons, in Wyoming. National Geographic reported that he lost one of the arteries that supply blood to his brain. Four days later, Chin was caught in an avalanche and survived.

Both men went back to Meru. During the 2011 climb Ozturk had what National Geographic describes as a mini-stroke at altitude, though accounts differ on the cause. In October 2011 the team made the first ascent of the Shark's Fin.

How do you film a climb you are also making?

There was no camera crew. Chin and Ozturk are the credited cinematographers, and Marketplace reported that the stars also served as cameramen, which helped keep the film inexpensive. Ozturk has said that climbing always took precedence over filming, and that the clips on the wall are short because the team was conservative with its limited batteries.

That is why the footage feels the way it does: shots taken when a moment allowed, by someone who was also belaying a partner. The rope in the frame is the same rope holding the person who is holding the camera.

Chin then had trouble cutting the footage into a film. He brought in Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, a documentary filmmaker who had not been on the climb, and she co-directed. They showed rough cuts in 2012.

What happened to the film?

After Sundance, Music Box Films released it in U.S. theatres on 14 August 2015. It grossed about $2.3 million in the United States, and Marketplace called it one of the highest-grossing documentaries of the year. On 1 December 2015 it was one of 15 films shortlisted for the Best Documentary Feature Oscar, out of 124 submitted. Rotten Tomatoes lists it at 88% positive from 78 reviews.

The larger result came next. Chin and Vasarhelyi made a second climbing film together. That film won the Best Documentary Feature Oscar on 24 February 2019, and reports describe it as the first climbing film to win the award. Meru is where that pairing started, and it is the one that shows what the sport cost the people in it.

Who is it for?

It suits anyone who likes a story about stubbornness more than a story about mountains, and anyone curious about the film that came before the Oscar winner. It is in English.

Documentary