How does a documentary filmmaker choose his subjects? How do they know it’s a story that will keep them – and audiences – engaged? It’s a question I’m eager to ask Amir Bar-Lev, when I meet him.
“I’ve been asking myself that recently too,” he replies, softly. “What is my litmus test? And I recently concluded that the way I pick stories is…I ask myself: does this subject matter genuinely perplex me? Do I feel confused when I think about what my feelings are around this story?”
Bar-Lev has been making non-fiction films for the past quarter-century, picking at those feelings of confusion time and again. His subjects – at first glance wildly different – range from four-year-old Marla Olmstead, whose artwork sold for thousands (2007’s My Kid Could Paint That); NFL player Pat Tillman, who enlisted in the US army only to be tragically killed in Afghanistan by friendly fire (2010’s The Tillman Story); and American band The Grateful Dead (2017’s Grammy-nominated Long Strange Trip).
His latest film, The Last First: Winter K2, is another big swing, a tale of mountaineering courage and chaos.
“Certainly this is not a story about a little painter,” he says, alluding to My Kid Could Paint That, “but I think there actually are more similarities than you might think. It’s a story that has a mystery at the heart of it. And in some ways, it’s less interesting to try to get to the bottom of the mystery than to just learn a bit about how human beings tell stories and make meaning in the world. In some ways, we are more interested in that than fact.”
The Last First recounts what happened when, in 2020-21, multiple teams of mountaineers attempted to make the first ever successful winter ascent to the top of K2, the second highest peak on the planet. Known as “the savage mountain”, nearly 100 people have died climbing its treacherous icy surface, more than have died ascending any other peak. At the time the film unfolds, scaling it in winter remained the last great mountaineering challenge left on Earth.
Among Bar-Lev’s protagonists there are: Icelandic climber John Snorri Sigurjónsson; Pakistani father-and-son team Ali Sadpara and Sajid Sadpara; and Nepalese mountaineer Nirmal ‘Nims’ Purja, a superstar of the sport who ultimately led his team to the top first.
But what follows is less about triumph than tragedy – with five deaths scarring the accomplishment – and the subsequent fallout, with the Nepalese team even accused of cutting safety ropes.
Bar-Lev first heard about events three years after the fact. “Initially I was made aware of a bunch of very serious allegations, mostly aimed at the Nepalese,” he explains. He began investigating – including the allegation that the Nepalese team hadn’t even made it to the summit. “I didn’t find any merit in any of those allegations,” he states. “That’s not to say that there isn’t an interesting debate to have over the degree to which they brought a very brass-knuckled, competitive spirit to Winter K2…a place where only cooperation is going to lead to survival and anything but cooperation will lead to tragedy.”
Gradually, the story evolved from an Alpine whodunnit into something entirely different. “It’s a story in my mind about the way we live today,” he says. “It’s not really a mountaineering film on some level, it’s a film about things that we’re all a part of, which is the inequality in the world between different socioeconomic classes; the boredom that many of us feel with life, especially in the West; the desperate straits that other people find themselves in that would make them put their lives in danger; and the way that social media has supercharged our very human desire to be seen all the time.”
During his research, Bar-Lev read John Krakauer’s Into Thin Air, which detailed a 1996 Everest climb that resulted in eight deaths and yet, in the wake of publication, drew even more people to the mountain.
“What’s interesting is that humans value safety, but not in a paramount way. The one thing we value more than safety is a good story. Primo Levi talks about that, right? Even more important than the all-important search for safety is the all-important search for meaning. And nothing gives us more meaning than a good story with a hero, with a narrow escape from death.”
Alluding to the Italian-Jewish chemist and Shoah survivor, might seem like a stretch for a mountaineering doc, but Bar-Lev’s point is surely intriguing. “That’s one of the reasons why historically young men have been drawn to war,” he continues. “Jean-Paul Sartre says, ‘We were never as free as we were under German occupation.’ On one level, we don’t want things like occupation or war or danger to happen to us. But on another level, we do. So that’s the interesting thing. And that’s why I can’t just say they’re crazy. I think we’re all crazy.’”
Born in 1972, Bar-Lev grew up on the West Coast of America. His father moved over from Israel when he just six. “I have an Israeli name, but I’m just a Jewish kid from Berkeley, California,” he says. I ask if he has plans to tell any stories connected to his roots.
Intriguingly, he is in the process of restoring his very first film Fighter, made in 2000. The story follows two Czech-Jewish Holocaust survivors, friends Jan Weiner and Arnost Lustig, as they revisit Theresienstadt.
“I’ve been thinking about Fighter a lot lately,” he says. “The interesting and tragic thing about the film is that I really did think I was primarily setting out to tell a story about something before it went away, which is the story of fascism, the story of global antisemitism. Maybe I was being naive but 25 years later, I see that that I was very wrong, and that that film is prescient than, something I didn’t know in the late 90s when I was making it in my late twenties.”
He first met Weiner and Lustig when he was on exchange programme at FAMU, the Prague Film Academy, in 1993, and the lessons were invaluable. “It’s the film through which I figured out how to tell a story. It features two good friends who are very different…they take a road trip, and their friendship falls apart. So, I had to figure out how to represent their different perspectives, and it’s a style of storytelling that I think has found its full flowering in K2.
“So new project is, you could say, also my first project,” he says. What a way to come full circle.
The Last First: Winter K2 is in cinemas now and available to stream on Apple TV
To get more from Life, click here to sign up for our free Life newsletter.