I am reviewing the documentary film Touching The Void which is an excellent film. This movie was released several years ago and scooped quite a few prestigious awards. Steven MacDonald who directed it has since made The Last King Of Scotland & The Eagle. This film is about a climbing expedition to climb a previously unclimbed peak and the mishaps that befell them. They were a 3 man expedition with one of them looking after the basecamp and the other 2 going to the 21,000 ft up in the Peruvian Andes. They were plagued by sudden bad weather which meant a lot of the snow and ice which would have aided them in climbing the mountain disappeared. They didn’t realise it but they were climbing an over hanging ridge of ice that gave way and resulted in one of them breaking his leg and apparently the lower part of the leg drove itself through the knee cap. The other climber tried to tie themselves together but at one stage the injured man was hanging in mid air suspended by the rope after a slip and the other mountaineer had to cut the rope to save himself. Luckily the fallen mountaineer fell into a crevasse of deep snow. At this stage they had already been to the summit but anyway he was given up for dead. He survived but had to climb out of the crevasse with a thin rope and cross all sorts of obstacles including a glacier complete with crevasses and with a broken leg. It would be a huge challenge for an able bodied person. There is a happy ending to this amazing story and it mixes interviews with re enacted action. I really enjoyed watching this and it’s a real nail biter. Apparently no one has climbed that mountain since so they are the only ones.
