The Vancouver International Film Festival (VIFF) has added a showing of Meru for tomorrow night at The Centre for Performing Arts in Vancouver.
Bridging the gap between an extreme sports mountain film and a mainstream documentary feature, Meru is an intensely vivid, dramatic, adrenaline-charged adventure movie, with images so breathtaking that vertigo is a real possibility.
At 20,700 feet, Meru may not be a giant mountain in Himalayan terms. But real climbers know that to ascend the central peak by way of the Shark’s Fin is far more challenging than Everest, involving several days on a sheer rock face in subzero temperatures. This is no place for Sherpas. What you bring, you carry. When all-star climbing team Conrad Anker, Jimmy Chin and Renan Ozturk attempted it in 2008, a snowstorm trapped them in their tent, hanging by ropes off the side of the cliff, for three nights and four days. With meagre rations stretched to thimbles of hummus, they were forced to turn back within 100 metres of the summit. Chin—a professional cameraman—vowed he would not be coming back. But his friend and mentor Conrad had a different idea…
With expert insight from writer Jon Krakauer (Into Thin Air; Into the Wild) and interviews with the climbers and their loved ones, Meru—directed by Chin and E. Chai Vasarhelyi—doesn’t just put us on the mountain and in these men’s boots, but into their heads and hearts, as well. The stakes are life or death, elemental, and definitive: stay safe, admit your limitations and throw away years of preparation; or plunge ahead, stare down disaster and return home a hero. That is, if you make it.
