Educational Media Reviews Online

Sherpas - herders, traders, farmers, and lamas, now porters and guides. This documentary portrays the lives and traditions of these tenacious mountain people, a small ethnic group numbering about 35,000 in Nepal. It is filmed in the heart of Sherpa country, a handful of valleys and the three-river watershed in eastern Nepal known as Khumbu.

Vivid footage depicts the traditional sustainable, subsistence Sherpa lifestyle, one now widely impacted by the influx of some thirteen thousand mountaineers, trekkers, and tourists annually. They come to the home of some of the highest mountain peaks on the planet, most notably that of Mt. Everest, known both as Sagarmatha and Chomolungma - Mother Goddess of the World. Nearly eighty years ago the 1922 British Everest Expedition brought some of the first English foreigners to Khumbu. Now trek tourism regularly brings the outside world in to a place where yaks travel past rustic guesthouses and hotels and the occasional satellite dish.

Stunning photography captures the glorious mountain scenery of the Khumbu region and its astonishing seasonal changes. Beauty and hardship abound in an area where the growing season is only three to four months and heavy manual labor is a way of life. Noted for their physiologic adaptation to high-altitude hypoxia and extraordinary physical performance, the Sherpas have been hired increasingly as guides and porters by climbers. In a country where the average income is $175.00 U.S. dollars, Sherpa guides can make $1200 in four months by taking climbers up the mountains, risking their lives to do so. Images of the heavily laden men and women allude to the physical price paid for by the porters. Their health is often adversely affected with significant impacts on their lives and that of their families.

Although not mentioned in the film, the Nepalese government designated Khumbu as Sagarmatha National Park in 1976. Bordering other preserves in the east and north, it forms one of the largest blocks of contiguous protected areas in Asia. Still, deforestation is a growing concern in Khumbu and most of Nepal and Tibet as trek tourism increases the demand for resources, wood for fuel and construction timber and grass fodder for yaks.

Buddhism is entwined in all aspects of life. Gompas, or monasteries, serve as centers of learning and culture and form the core of Sherpa spiritual life. The film captures a ceremonial annual village festival, replete with colorful dancing figures, the vibrantly patterned clothing of young and old, and events both prayerful and celebratory. Chortens, memorials, mani stones, rock cairns, and prayer flags are beautifully photographed. Rather than conquerors, the Sherpas revere the mountains, believing them to be the domains of gods and goddesses.

Prominently featured in clips is the now deceased Sherpa Tenzing Norgay, a mountaineer of great skill and the first to top Everest with Edmund Hillary in 1953. Although the film holds a copyright date of 1995, the May 1996 Everest disaster so vividly chronicled in Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air is mentioned. Not mentioned is the successful climb to the summit by Norgay's son Jamling a few weeks later, on May 23, forty-three years after his father's successful bid.

Sherpa means "people of the east." Sherpa history is superficially covered, perhaps inevitable in a short film, glossing over the reasons for migration four hundred years ago from the eastern Tibet province of Kham. Only casually mentioned is the more recent Chinese occupation of Tibet in the 1950s that resulted in a significant curtailment of trade. Education is not explicitly addressed and excludes mention of the Himalayan Trust established by Hillary in 1960. The Trust raises money to fund health and literacy projects requested by the Sherpas, including the establishment of Khumbu's only high school.

One would wish for more than two brief interviews (one translated, one with an English-speaking Sherpa) to gain Sherpa perceptions of their world and experience. Everest has been called the highest junkyard in the world. How do they reconcile their belief that the mountains should remain pristine and undefiled by excessive human activity? How do the Sherpas view the desire of mountaineers to climb, spending enormous time and money, and the changes wrought along the way? The British-accented narrator only gives us an outside-in perspective.

Although lacking in detail and with some limitations, the film does chronicle the Sherpa people and their way of life. It is recommended for high-school ages on up, and for Asian collections and special collections interested in Everest and the Himalayan region.