Director Lucy Walker brings a story of incredible resilience to the screen with Mountain Queen: The Summits of Lhakpa Sherpa.
Lhakpa Sherpa’s story is one of superhuman persistence. Growing up the daughter of yak farmers in a rural Nepali community, she wasn’t allowed a job or an education, but the self-described nature girl was determined to work in the mountains. After dressing as a boy to get her first job hauling gear as a porter, followed by years of scraping by as a single mother, ostracized from her community, she eventually secured financial backing for her dream in 200 — to become the first Sherpa woman to climb Mount Everest and survive.
But even with this lauded accomplishment under her belt, these were only the beginnings of the tribulations Sherpa would endure. At the start of Mountain Queen: The Summits of Lhakpa Sherpa, director Lucy Walker’s film chronicling the exceptional mountain climber’s life, we find Sherpa working long hours at Whole Foods and living in a tiny apartment in West Hartford, Connecticut with her two teenage daughters, Sunny and Shiny. She hasn’t summited a mountain in years.
Walker’s film takes us through Sherpa’s harrowing and awe-inspiring life story as she gains the distinction of most Everest summits by a woman — a record she still holds — while also hiding the extreme lows of her marriage to another climber, marred by domestic violence that impacts the entire family. In 2022, Sherpa returned to Everest, this time with her daughter Shiny in tow, to attempt her tenth summit at the age of 48.
“It’s just the most inspiring story I could imagine,” says Walker. “If you had to look for a theme in my work, I’d say it’s incredible people who find grace and courage when life gets really difficult. I have to pick the absolute most exciting, important stories I could possibly be telling, and this was that.” The director has been Oscar-nominated for her documentary work twice before: in 2010, for her feature Waste Land, and in 2011, for her short film The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom, each a story of extraordinary resilience.
With Mountain Queen, Walker showcases yet another remarkable figure in Sherpa, centering the story around the climber’s return to Everest in an attempt to bring courage to women around the world, as well as the women in her own home: Sunny, Shiny, and herself. Here, Walker speaks with Queue about her latest journey into the human spirit.
An edited version of the conversation follows.
Lhakpa Sherpa
Miranda Tsang: How did you come across Lhakpa Sherpa’s story, and what drew you to it?
Lucy Walker: In 2004 I made another movie [Blindsight] and climbed the mountain next to Everest on the Tibet side, coincidentally called Lhakpa Ri. I also read the incredible piece about Lhakpa in Outside Magazine and really got into her story. Our producer Chris Newman reached out to Lhakpa and developed a relationship with her, gained her trust, and we all kind of came together to make this documentary. It’s been a multiyear journey — we joke that this has been our Everest.
I think a lot of people are going to have their minds blown when they see the incredible voyage of Lhakpa’s life. This has dramatic visuals, mountaineering, and a thrilling and cinematic story about a woman, which really makes me excited because I think that’s something you don't see nearly enough of.
Why was it important for you to show the obstacles for Lhakpa and other women growing up in the 70s in Sherpa communities?
LW: She was very specific about wanting to [climb Everest] to show people what women are capable of. It took her years of persuading people because she didn’t have the money, and it’s very expensive. She had been put through a lot of shame in her life. She had to cut her hair off and pretend to be a boy to get a job, and when she got promoted, the name of the job was kitchen boy. But to work on the mountains, her beloved mountains, that was what she had to do.
Her motivation is deeply rooted in the injustices that she experienced early on in life, and she wanted to really show people that she was worth more than that, and women were worth more than that. It definitely increases my awareness and awe at what she’s accomplished. It’s really hard to immigrate to a new country and culture when you can’t even read a street sign or go to a grocery store and read the labels, and it makes her accomplishments all the more impressive. It makes us really aware of the mountains that people climb in their lives.
Lhakpa Sherpa
You spent a lot of time with Lhakpa’s daughters, depicting their journeys. Why did you want to include their perspectives?
LW: At the beginning of the movie, Lhakpa hasn’t climbed for a few years, and the girls are struggling. They’ve been through such trauma as a family, and she has this real instinct that Everest is the way forward. I was really glad that Shiny went with [Lhakpa] to base camp because I wanted to film it, but we weren’t sure Lhakpa was going to succeed. We weren’t even sure she was going to come home safe. This is terribly dangerous stuff still, with a lot of unknowns.
As a filmmaker, it’s not a trivial concern when you’re dealing with vulnerable young people. At the start of the film, Sunny has barely spoken for months, and [by the end] she looks at her mom with her eyes on fire and says, “Mom . . . it’s so many steps up that mountain . . . I almost felt that accomplishment in myself.” Then when she looks in the mirror and says, “I see someone that can be something,” you think, That is a different person than we met before Lhakpa climbed, and that is what Lhakpa’s genius is. She’s healed her family through the climbing. As a filmmaker, you dream of stories that powerful.
How did you obtain such intimate footage of the ascent, and the great archival footage of Lhakpa’s previous climbs and interviews?
LW: I’m not a brilliant mountaineer, and on the south side [of Everest], you have to go through this very dangerous icefall right after base camp, which I’m not technically capable of doing. Because I had already made a movie where I went up on the other side and understood how you film up there, I was able to feel confident technically about directing, and how we could build the right team, and have the right equipment, and make the right plans for how to capture it so that we could really cover that story. I felt really excited that I could put my knowledge [from Blindsight] to use to tell this story, honestly. It’s obviously such a coincidence as well that the mountain I climbed was called Lhakpa, and Lhakpa recognized that, and I think that also gave her confidence that I’d be able to tell her story.
I was relentless about wanting to find all the material that had been filmed before, and I knew Lhakpa’s first expedition in the year 2000 had been filmed. I thought that would be really cool, to see her as a young woman, right before any of her success and tragedy, before any of the stuff that we look at in the film happened, and I was able to get the raw material that had been filmed of her. When you find this, it’s like this magical magnifying glass, where you can go through space and time and see these moments that happened with your own eyes. [The footage] makes the audience feel like they’re really there, taking the journey in the present tense along with Lhakpa. That’s the storytelling I absolutely love to do.
Lhakpa Sherpa
Speaking to the power of editing, we see flashes of Lhakpa’s life in a truly ecstatic, cinematic sequence as she’s climbing Everest for the 10th time. Why did you decide to break form to include that?
LW: I love poetic and emotional storytelling in documentary filmmaking when the story calls for it. And when you are climbing, it’s really tough, partly because there’s so little oxygen. It’s almost like you are hallucinating. You go into this reverie, and you’re not thinking straight, and your brain is so disengaged from reality. Part of Lhakpa’s magnificence is that she keeps going when it starts to get really loopy. She does not turn around. And [in the sequence] you can see why she’s climbing. She’s doing it for her kids. She’s doing it because of what she’s come through, to heal from those memories that are haunting her, and it’s a very uplifting experience for her.
There’s one more sequence like it, when she’s knocked unconscious on Everest in 2004. Her life flashes before her eyes, and she says all the voices turn to birds, and she flies to her home village. She wants to die, but then she hears the voices of her kids and she gets pulled back into wanting to not die yet. It’s an absolutely textbook example of a near-death experience, where you even get a choice about coming back. I felt that technique was justified there because it was, again, this kind of out-of-body, trippy, memory stream, and so it felt very beautiful to do that with the editing.
What do you hope viewers take away from this film?
LW: One thing that I think Lhakpa embodies, and it shines in the movie, is her love of nature and her belief that Everest is her doctor, as she says, and nature is her antidepressant. She’s such a pinup for empowerment and healing through nature.
I also think that [they’ll] see a family heal, to come through difficult stuff, to have complicated people in the family, and go [forth] with love and courage, and have that vision of healing and moving forward in life in a positive way. My goodness, isn’t that what the world needs?
