Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.The extraordinary abides in unlikely places. In recent years, a middle-aged Nepalese woman called Lhakpa Sherpa has worked at Whole Foods in West Hartford, Connecticut. Customers may not have realised the figure cleaning salad trays was — and is — an icon of climbing. Likewise, Mountain Queen, the admirable new documentary about her, sits on Netflix, next to episodes of Cobra Kai and Bridgerton. If the film isn’t quite as trailblazing as its subject, it still has plenty to recommend it. This is a movie of unusual depth and earned feelgood.The mountain in question is Everest, which Sherpa has now conquered 10 times — more than any other woman. The film is rightfully a celebration, but it has a worldly edge. She spent her childhood in a rural village, from where locals could see the peak of what they call Chomolungma (“God and mother”). It was the 1980s, and an explosion in elite climbing was transforming the Himalayas.In the west, the traditional surname Sherpa has become a synonym for the role of guide and porter to foreign adventurers; the job gave routine employment to Nepalese boys and men. And Lhakpa Sherpa? A disappointment to her mother, who saw her as too robust for a daughter. (“Nature girl,” Sherpa proudly calls herself now.)The British director Lucy Walker has form for telling enlightening stories at extreme heights. In 2006, she made the moving documentary Blindsight, about blind Tibetan teenagers scaling a Himalayan mountain. Here again, compelling raw material is nimbly shaped. Walker’s lens is wide enough for nuance.And the candour is panoramic. For all the supposed purity of climbing, money is a recurring theme; Sherpa’s first ascents were while working as a porter. (In a novelistic detail, she got the gig after cutting her hair short and passing as a boy.)Walker gives much of the film over to Sherpa’s own on-camera narration. That makes sense tonally. If Sherpas have too often been seen in the west as silent helpmeets, it feels past time to hear this tale first-hand. It also proves a masterstroke given the charisma of the subject, whose use of English packs an evocative punch. “I’m a dirty old raccoon,” she says, exhausted, during the 2022 “comeback” climb the film is built around. On screen, Everest is a constant wonder; even now, Sherpa is often still awestruck. The film is frank about a mountain that rarely loves its admirers back. Even relatively low altitudes bring nausea. Nightmare crevasses lead to the Death Zone.Walker must also confront the shadow cast by the late George Dijmarescu, the renowned Romanian-American climber Sherpa wed in 2002. His descent into spousal abuse is sensitively dealt with, but it still horrifies. If Sherpa sometimes only seems fully alive on Everest, Dijmarescu threatens to obliterate her. But kudos again to the film: it doesn’t let this remarkable woman be defined by someone else’s violence.Not everything is flawless. Emotional conversations with teenage daughters Sunny and Shiny Dijmarescu have the staged feel of reality TV. But maybe you only notice because everything else is so smart and authentic. In another world, the life story of Lhakpa Sherpa would have become a big-screen sensation: a Himalayan Rocky. In this one, you will find it shrunk to fit your Netflix menu. But something giant still endures. ★★★★☆On Netflix from August 2
