Polish alpinist and filmmaker Eliza Kubarska returns to the Himalayas after her documentaries K2. Touching the Sky [+lee también:
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entrevista: Eliza Kubarska
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Rutkiewicz was the first European woman to climb Mount Everest and the first woman to climb K2 – and the first Pole in both cases. This was at the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s, the era of great climbers such as Reinhold Messner and Jerzy Kukuczka, famous for conquering all 14 eight-thousanders – all 14 peaks in the world higher than 8,000 metres. And it was also a time when women were a lot less present – and wanted – in the mountaineering world than they are today.

Rutkiewicz meticulously recorded her adventures, both on film and in audio diaries, and as she was a celebrity at home, Kubarska was able to draw from an abundance of TV archives. There are several key layers to the film: Rutkiewicz’s troubled and difficult personality, the position of women in society, the competitive dimension of extreme sports, and perhaps the most intriguing but also the most oblique and mystical angle, that of Buddhist spiritualism.

The latter one comes from the fact that, before disappearing on her megalomaniac quest to conquer all eight Himalayan eight-thousanders in one year, Rutkiewicz told her mother that if she didn’t come back, it meant she had become a nun in one of the region’s remote monasteries. Rutkiewicz’s state of being torn between her goal-driven personality and the inevitable influence of Eastern philosophies that negate the ego is well documented in her diaries and letters, and is conveyed in the film with clarity, with the addition of Kubarska’s interviews with Buddhist monks and nuns.

The peak that Rutkiewicz disappeared on is Kanchenjunga, the third-highest mountain in the world, where she went with a Mexican team. Tibetan Buddhists consider it a sacred path into Shambhala, a spiritual kingdom that one is allowed to enter only upon reaching a certain level of awakening. It is certainly natural that Rutkiewicz would want to dispense with earthly attachments after losing 30 team members and having two failed marriages during her career. Crucially, the love of her life, a German doctor, died in an expedition in 1990, which, along with a controversy surrounding a doubt over whether she had earlier indeed reached Annapurna, might have pushed her to try and achieve her extreme goal.

It is a thematically rich and dense film, perhaps too much so: one of its problems is repetition, with the variety of themes being addressed again and again. And it seems that, along with the engaging narrative and accomplished cinematic elements, with majestic Himalayan vistas accompanied by suspenseful music performed on local instruments, Kubarska has actually presented her own wish for her heroine’s destiny, rather than exploring what really happened. The director puts herself in the film from the beginning, which does imply such an aim, but the approach is clearly an investigative one, so the viewer is left in a sort of liminal space between what could have been and what they ended up experiencing.

The Last Expedition is a co-production by the UK’s Braidmade Films, Switzerland’s Tilt Production and Poland’s Vertical Vision Film Studios, with the participation of Swiss and Polish national broadcasters, and Germany’s 3sat.