The Wall of Shadows
Filmmakers capture a Himalayan climb and a Sherpa’s inner conflict in the mountaineering documentary The Wall of Shadows.
The camera peers upward at a climber inching along amid stiff winds and the haze of heavy snowfall. Not far above him, powder and ice avalanche down a cliff. The fearsome east face of Kumbhakarna had never been scaled and The Wall of Shadows charts a harrowing attempt.
The winner of the American Cinematographer Award at the 2021 Salem Film Festival in Massachusetts, is not your typical Himalayan expedition film. “It doesn’t fall into the standard of Western climbers reaching the top and waving their ice axe in the air,” observes 2nd camera/drone operator Keith Partridge. Director Eliza Kubarska had a different idea in mind: eschew the ‘hero’ point of view and focus on the Sherpas instead.
“The question is, who are the real heroes?” asks the Polish documentarian, who is herself an accomplished mountaineer. “The idea was to turn the camera around and focus on the other side. I told the climbers that I just needed them as background to my story about Sherpas. I think they were surprised, because they planned to climb one of the hardest mountains in the world.”
The first part of the film starts quietly enough with an intimate portrait of its protagonist, Ngada Sherpa. Kubarska and Polish cinematographer Piotr Rosołowski devoted a full month to filming the hardscrabble life of Ngada and his family at home, capturing quotidian moments alongside the lore and legends of Kumbhakarna.
At that point, “I didn’t know what kind of film it would be,” the director notes. She knew that Sherpas in Nepal were mostly Tibetan Buddhists, and for them Kumbhakarna is a kingdom of the gods. She wanted to contrast mindsets — Sherpas’ belief in the holiness of the mountain versus alpinists’ quest to conquer the peak — and how Sherpas get caught in the middle. But she couldn’t be sure she’d have the ingredients. “Kumbhakarna is so hard, there are few people in the world who can climb it,” she explains. “Expeditions there happen maybe once every 10 years.”
As luck would have it, she heard about an elite Russian duo, Dmitry “Dima” Golovchenko and Sergey Nilov, who hoped to climb it alpine style. They were looking for Sherpas, so she connected them with Ngada, and the expedition was set in motion. A third climber from Poland, Marcin Tomaszewski, joined in.
Ngada agreed to the expedition despite heavy objections from his wife. Because Kumbhakarna is holy, Sherpas have refused to climb it. But Ngada reluctantly decides to break the taboo, needing extra cash after learning that his son wants to become a doctor, and school costs money. His wife protests: “It’s climbing God’s body.”
Ngada Sherpa with his wife and son, who face wrenching decisions about whether to climb.
Logistics and Gear
During the expedition, the idea was that Rosołowski would cover the Sherpas and Partridge the climbers, plus any shooting above base camp (4800 meters). Rosołowski is not a climber, but knew from trekking in Nepal that he’d be okay up to that elevation. Whereas Partridge specializes in extreme environments, including high elevations like the Andes (Touching the Void) and Everest.
Rosołowski had constructed an intimate style during his time filming Ngada at home. “Mainly I was trying to be close to them with just one lens,” a Canon CN-E35mm prime. But after the expedition got going, that plan fell apart. “The more dramatic the climbing,” he says, “the less we stuck with the aesthetic guidelines established at the beginning.” Everyone was just trying to keep up with events as bad weather intervened.
Partridge adds, “The mountain is a character, and every character will have good days and bad days, be in a happy mood or a less happy mood.” Kumbhakarna first showed its ferocious side on the trek to base camp. Heavy snow fell, cutting off the pass. The contingent had to take another route, which added 100 kilometers and lost five days. That, in turn, cut into time for the climbers to acclimate to the altitude, and the problems cascaded from there. “I think Kumbhakarna was fighting against us,” says the director.
As Partridge recalls, “Moving into base camp, conditions took a turn for the worse through heavy snow. To the point we’re breaking trail thigh-deep in snow. That’s pretty hard work when you’re pushing 5000 meters.”
“I think Kumbhakarna was fighting against us.”
It was Rosołowski’s toughest day. “I was on the edge of my physical limits,” he says. “It was very difficult to keep going. Forget about filming!” Nonetheless, he managed to run ahead to capture shots of people struggling against the snow. “It was really difficult physically. You have to be in good condition because you have to be quicker than the whole group, then you have to catch up [after they pass].”
There were technical troubles as well. A generator broke early in the ascent, and they had to wait a week for a replacement to be carried up from Katmandu. But they managed to eke out six days on batteries thanks to smartly chosen camera systems, combined with strategic planning. “That week was more like shooting documentary on film, when you have to plan exactly,” Rosołowski says.
Filming in 4K, Rosołowski continued with a Canon EOS C200 and Canon EF primes. Partridge had a Canon EOS C300 Mark II, and mostly relied on a Canon 18–80mm T4.4 Compact-Servo zoom. “The Canon systems are incredibly reliable, with very good battery life in the cold,” says Partridge, who brought six batteries which could last three continuous hours each. “[Other cameras are] too heavy or power hungry. So everything escalates. If you need more power, you need more batteries and that adds more weight. So you’d need more porters, more Sherpas. Can you carry it up yourself? Probably not.”
The production mainly shot handheld, but occasionally used a tripod or gimbal. Handheld shots could be tough, especially when a camera’s operator was utterly winded. “When you’re running around doing handheld work, you’re short of breath pretty much all the time,” Partridge says. “So that’s the main challenge: maintaining steadiness when you’re out of breath. The heavier the systems, the worse the situation becomes. Primarily, it was a case of keeping the main cameras as stripped-down as possible.
To protect gear from the cold, they built special cases and threw in chemical hand-warmer packets. “We were taking all the electronic equipment into the tent at night,” Rosołowski recalls. “But the best idea was to sleep with the camera in the sleeping bag.”
Drone work
Thin air also increased the difficulty of flying a drone. Working with a small DJI Mavic 2 Pro, Partridge managed to capture spectacular shots over glaciers and icefalls that showed how vast and treacherous the terrain was. In one case, he took the drone up to 5300 meters. “The problem is keeping it airborne when the air density doesn’t support it,” he notes. The motor is working extra hard, so “instead of getting 18 to 24 minutes of battery time in the air, we were down to six. Virtually every flight we did, all the warning lights were on. You always have a 20 percent contingency. We were well on reserve power, battling to get the drone back.”
Final push
After everyone reaches base camp, conflicts start to break out. Climbers argue about strategy while Sherpas grumble that the climbers only listen to themselves.
The Russians take a day to scout. The next morning, the trio sets out accompanied by Ngada. The climb is formidable. One shot looks up vertiginously at an alpinist on a rope scaling a 300-meter vertical wall. And that’s not the real east wall, which towers 3000 meters. In between, there’s a ragged icefall to traverse.
Ngada realizes it’s beyond his capabilities and turns back. At base camp, his boss explains that if he doesn’t climb, he doesn’t get paid. But Ngada doesn’t want to risk his life. The climbers return that night and hash out what went wrong. The Polish climber resigns, claiming the Russians weren’t acting like a team and didn’t allow sufficient time to acclimate. The next day the Russians set off as a duo. “This film is not about climbing,” Golovchenko comments as he packs for the ascent. “It’s about people.”
The director accompanied them to 5200 meters, scaling the 300-meter wall by climbing the ropes the Russians had fixed — a technique called jumaring. She shot some scenes on the plateau where they all camped, then turned around. After that, the climbing footage was shot by the Russians, who’d been provided with GoPros. Partridge returned to England, while Rosołowski and Kubarska waited at base camp along with the Sherpas.
Two lingering GoPro shots show the seeming impossibility of this climb, as we watch Nilov slowly pick his way up a vertical wall caked with deep snow. Then Kumbhakarna shows its unhappy side again by whipping up a blizzard.
“I knew they were fighting for their lives.”
When the director gave the Russians their GoPros, she told them, “You can make very long shots. You have to be patient.” When she later collected the cameras, she was first struck by the fact they kept filming, then by how powerful the footage was. “I knew they were fighting for their lives,” she says. “All the shots when Sergei is on the wall climbing very slow were made by Dima. I discovered he was so great! He was really patient. I was impressed. They wanted to keep their promise [to film].” Her only regret was that they didn’t record their own faces when inside the tent. “He told me he didn’t think it was interesting,” she says.
Meanwhile, Rosołowski continued to document life at base camp during the two-week wait. “But you can film this kind of thing only so many days,” he says. “We didn’t know what to do, because it wasn’t clear if they’d come back the same way or on the other side of the mountain. Psychologically, it was very difficult. You’re just waiting there at 5000 meters, and the weather is getting worse. We were like prisoners of this base camp.”
Ultimately bad weather forced the Russians to stop 400 meters short of the summit and descend on the other side, following an old French route from 1962. The director had to convey step-by-step directions via satellite phone, provided by her alpinist cousin and his topographer friend. “They started calling people all over the world” to get the route, Kubarska says. None of that is in the film. “It didn’t pertain to subject,” she says simply.
Everyone else at base camp packed up and left, while Kubarska, a Sherpa, and a very athletic sound person trekked around the mountain to meet them. They brought food, which the Russians had depleted. Kubarska is the one who shot their descent and the close-up of Golovchenko’s ravaged, haunted face. “They looked very bad,” she recalls.
Kubarska felt the mountain was fighting against them, while Rosołowski looked at the challenges they faced as the conflict that a narrative needs. “The struggle with the weather and all the obstacles, at the end it was a gift from Kumbhakarna because we had different stages of progress and obstacles which the protagonist had to go through — it was interesting for the dramatic structure.”
