{"id":677100,"date":"2026-11-06T21:16:11","date_gmt":"2026-11-06T21:16:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/677100\/"},"modified":"2026-11-06T21:16:11","modified_gmt":"2026-11-06T21:16:11","slug":"why-the-last-first-k2-winter-is-unlike-any-other-mountaineering-doc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/677100\/","title":{"rendered":"Why ‘The Last First: K2 Winter’ Is Unlike Any Other Mountaineering Doc"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tAmir Bar-Lev has been making documentaries<\/a> for more than 25 years in all kinds of genres, but the Tillman Story and Long Strange Trip director never thought he\u2019d approach the category of mountaineering. He had some personal issues with the field on a cinematic level and knew nothing about it on an informational level. Then a producer with whom he\u2019s worked before got him up to speed on the chaos that happened around six years ago at Pakistan\u2019s K2, the second highest mountain on Earth, and told him she saw him as the right person to tell the story.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe Last First: Winter K2 captures the frenzy around a group of mountaineers\u2019 attempt to become the first people to ascend the mountain in winter \u2014 essentially, completing the last epic \u201cfirst\u201d that exists for the extreme sport. Some people fall in love; others die in pursuit of the goal. The project came to Bar-Lev with a ton of material captured on the ground already licensed, from potential documentary<\/a> footage to videos made on iPhones and GoPros. Taken all together, the content introduced a slew of fascinating characters, as well as deeper meditations on the human condition, the perilous function of modern social media, and the reality of what it means to face death in the face.<\/p>\n

\n\tBar-Lev joined The Hollywood Reporter at the SCAD Savannah Film Festival<\/a>, as part of its Docs to Watch program, for an in-depth breakdown of how he made the movie. Watch the video below and read on for edited excerpts of our conversation.<\/p>\n

\n\tYou were not on the ground making a movie about this in real time \u2014 it came to you thereafter. Talk a little bit about your awareness of this period of time and when the idea to make the movie came your way.<\/p>\n

\n\tI\u2019m not a mountaineer at all, and if it\u2019s not clear, I got involved like three years after these events. I got a funny call. Two [producers] are a married couple, John Battsek and Sarah Thomson. They\u2019re British, and I\u2019ve worked with John a bunch before they got married; Sarah called me and said, \u201cJohn doesn\u2019t think you\u2019re going to be interested in this, but I think you would be.\u201d He thought I wouldn\u2019t be interested in it because I didn\u2019t really know anything about mountaineering; she thought I would be interested because in some ways it\u2019s about mountaineering, but it\u2019s about something that I find in every film \u2014 the way people find meaning, the way culture works. I thought of it like a science-fiction film where there\u2019s an alien landscape and humans go there, but they bring their human foibles.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhat was the process of understanding the amount of footage you would have and how you would access that footage? I would imagine there were many ways to tell this story, so how did you find your own narrative center?<\/p>\n

\n\tThere were 60 people on the mountain, so we could tell 60 stories if we wanted to. I had the best collaboration experience I\u2019ve had yet with films. I keep coming back to the fact that these were Brits \u2014 it has a role in the answer because when they gave me the job, they told me, \u201cYou\u2019re going to be the only non-Brit, because they have really good tax breaks in England that we don\u2019t have here.\u201d So they said, \u201cYou\u2019re going to have to work with people.\u201d I worked with an all new, very young, really great British team, and we all had different ideas about what this film would be. The editor said, \u201cIt\u2019s just a film. For me, it\u2019s really just about [John] Snorri [Sigurj\u00f3nsson] and [Muhammad] Ali [Sadpara].\u201d I said, \u201cI see it as a kind of a Robert Altman thing.\u201d We met in the middle.<\/p>\n

\n\tBefore I was involved, they had licensed the footage from Elia, the filmmaker that you see in there. And they had licensed Snorri\u2019s GoPro footage and stuff like that. \u2026 There were six different documentaries being made there. One came to fruition, which was a little short film about Sergi [Mingote], and the rest, we incorporated their footage into ours. It was a very hard film to structure because it\u2019s a strange story. It\u2019s about a competition, and the competition is done a third of the way into the story, so figuring that out was complicated. There were a lot of misfires, as one does in editing.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe point of there being six different documentaries made at this time is in the text of the movie as well, right? Can you talk about, as you were learning more about what your film was, what this frenzy of activity represented to you?<\/p>\n

\n\tIt\u2019s a kind of story that you turn over and over in your mind. There\u2019s a reaction I get a lot with this film so far where people go, \u201cWhat\u2019s wrong with these people? Are they crazy?\u201d And they\u2019re a little bit crazy, but I think that what they are is a little bit transgressive. There\u2019s this exalted thing around mountaineering, and I feel it\u2019s a little bit like the last film I made, which was about The Grateful Dead. They\u2019re sort of druggies in a way \u2014 they don\u2019t take drugs, necessarily, but it\u2019s a similar kind of appeal. I don\u2019t feel totally judgmental about druggies, and at the same time, it\u2019s dangerous \u2014 I\u2019m a parent of three. I don\u2019t try to romanticize drugs, and I don\u2019t feel super judgmental about it. That\u2019s how I feel about mountaineering. Where it gets complicated is filming druggies or mountaineers because by its nature, you\u2019re giving it a platform, in a way. Especially with this kind of mountaineering, which is so risky, there\u2019s a concern that people play to the camera in a way. As a filmmaker, that bears scrutiny.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tAmir Bar-Lev speaks onstage at the 29th SCAD Savannah Film Festival.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tDerek White\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

\n\tWhen it came to the edit, what were some of the most central challenges of putting everything together and finding the story? As you got deeper into it, what came up?<\/p>\n

\n\tReining myself in was the main challenge. This story is a container for all these really interesting things about class, about race. You want to expand on that and make sure that it\u2019s coming across. The edit team had a joke at my expense at some point, a shorthand of cave-drawing scenes because I wanted to have \u2014 and we did even have at some point \u2014 a scene about cave drawings, which thankfully I was talked out of. That happened a bunch of times, where I would say, \u201cDocumentaries are just another example of what we\u2019ve been doing since the beginning of time. Somebody seems to cheat death or somebody seems to be less afraid of death, and you tell the village about it or you write it.\u201d This was essayistic stuff that I had to work through my system and then not put into the film because there was so much strictly narrative material that we needed to get through.<\/p>\n

\n\tOne of the great appeals of mountaineering movies is the visual awe and splendor, the sense that we as an audience are going into the unknown with these subjects. I wonder how you thought about the visual language of your movie, since you\u2019re working against that to some degree.<\/p>\n

\n\tI essentially thought of it as a base camp story. This is the interesting thing. We all know that in documentary, there\u2019s tons of artifice, but it runs the gamut. Sometimes it maybe crosses certain ethical lines; other times it\u2019s just how you have to tell a story. I came to realize that in order to film way up at the top, anywhere past camp two, takes a huge amount of artifice, essentially \u2014 to get the beauty shots of people climbing and stuff like that. It\u2019s almost like a nature documentary. You\u2019re pretending something happened later in the edit, but you\u2019re doing it saying, \u201cOK, come through the shot.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tIf you were to watch the raw tapes of some mountaineering films that look better than ours, it\u2019s because of that artifice. I\u2019m not saying there\u2019s anything wrong with artifice, but we don\u2019t want to do that. It felt like we would just be doing the thing that we\u2019re trying to be critical around. So we got a lot of footage from people\u2019s iPhones; we just embraced that aesthetic. Even though you do occasionally take a break and see a drone shot or something like that, the aesthetic was to try to be lo-fi and homemade rather than cinematic and sweeping.<\/p>\n

\n\tThis movie premiered at Sundance. How have you found the conversations that it\u2019s sparked over the past year?<\/p>\n

\n\tI\u2019m a very slow filmmaker. The last film I did, that Grateful Dead film, was 2017, so this was the longest gap. I\u2019m not always this slow. But in the interim, Letterboxd became a thing. It might have been a thing back then, but I\u2019m kind of late to the party. This is the first film where I\u2019ve watched Letterboxd in real time, which is amazing. You get so much feedback; it\u2019s like a firehose of feedback. I like when the feedback starts to be on opposite sides. If somebody says, \u201cIt\u2019s too short,\u201d another person goes, \u201cIt\u2019s too long.\u201d Somebody says, \u201cWhy didn\u2019t he go into this?\u201d and then \u201cWhy didn\u2019t he go into that?\u201d I feel like I got it exactly right.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhen I was a student making my first film, an absurdist short of a guy walking around Prague with a stack of dishes, we came up with this phrase like, \u201cIt\u2019s very hard to say nothing.\u201d And I kind of feel like I\u2019m trying to do that in every film. I\u2019m trying to say nothing. I don\u2019t want you to think it\u2019s like, \u201cOh, I just made a mess and that\u2019s the film.\u201d What you\u2019re trying to do is not be didactic. You\u2019re trying to leave room for the audience to draw their own conclusions, and it\u2019s really fun when they draw different conclusions from the same film. Then I feel like I\u2019ve done my job. I\u2019ve said nothing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Amir Bar-Lev has been making documentaries for more than 25 years in all kinds of genres, but the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":677101,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[900,1050,93,61,60,270,285947,280634],"class_list":["post-677100","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-documentaries","tag-documentary","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-movies","tag-scad-docs-to-watch","tag-scad-savannah-film-festival"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/677100","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=677100"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/677100\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/677101"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=677100"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=677100"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=677100"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}