Their Found Horizon
A Documentary Filmmaker Followed Blind Tibetan Teens To Unforeseeable New Heights

By John Anderson
Special to The Washington Post
Thursday, March 13, 2008

A guy walks into a film producer's office, looks at the crackberry-tapping mogul behind the desk, and says:

"Have I got a movie for you!"

"What's it about?"

"A blind man who climbs Mount Everest."

"And . . . ?"

"And a blind woman who travels across China by herself -- "

"Big deal."

" -- so she can establish a school for sightless kids in Tibet."

"Tibet? Hmm . . . Richard Gere . . ."

"Together they take a bunch of blind teenagers up the Himalayas."

"Yeah . . . ?"

"The kids have grown up being ostracized because blindness is seen as a punishment for sins of past lives."

"I see Keanu Reeves as the mountain climber . . ."

"Cultures clash, goals collide; high altitude, high anxiety -- "

"Mmmmm . . . Kate Hudson . . . Scarlett Johansson . . ."

" -- and the whole thing is a documentary!"

"What??!! Nobody's gonna believe that! Next!"

And yet it's all true. "Blindsight," which opens tomorrow in Washington, includes all of the plot devices above -- which aren't devices at all but the actual elements of an extraordinary expedition. In 2004, the American mountaineer Erik Weihenmayer, the first and only sightless climber to scale Mount Everest, joined Sabriye Tenberken, the founder of the educational program Braille Without Borders, to help lead six blind Tibetan teenagers up Lhakpa Ri, Everest's 23,000-foot neighbor. As recounted in director Lucy Walker's new film, the diverse goals of the climbers led to a Himalayan-size clash of philosophies and cultures, as well as the self-discovery of once-ostracized adolescents. Adding to that were the arduous physical demands of the climb.

"Call me a girl," Walker says over coffee in Beverly Hills, "but for every 10 persons who summit Mount Everest, one dies trying. I think there's this perception now that it's some kind of packaged tour: I've met these people for whom it was a fitness goal; a couple of guys have come up to me at screenings in Hollywood and said, 'I did it.' But there are memorial grounds on the mountain," she continues. "Most of the mountaineer guides have no toes. All have friends who have died. Accidents, falls, horrible things can happen -- like going out of the tent at night to use the bathroom and sliding down. . . .

"And there's altitude sickness -- you feel terrible, your head is pounding, your body's failing, you can't think, you can't move. I was fit, but I couldn't lift my head on my shoulders."

And she wasn't just climbing. She was making a movie.

"I kept thinking about the old Fred Astaire line -- how Ginger did everything Fred did, but backwards and in high heels," Walker says with a laugh. "People keep saying, 'Did you go?' and I say, 'Was it optional?' I don't know how you do documentaries remotely. I assume hands-on is what you do."

Walker was filming very hands-on people. "They're very tactile," she says of the blind kids. "They hold on to people and are led around that way. And though they may be blind, they're shockingly astute: With one guy, the blond doctor in the film, they'd say, 'Jeff, why do you make your arms so big when you're talking to Lucy?' They noticed that he was tensing his biceps, and I thought that was wonderful. Everyone was tensing their biceps, metaphorically."

This includes Walker's two lead characters and sometimes antagonists: Weihenmayer, who went blind as a teenager, reached the summit of Everest in 2001, the only blind man to do so, and Tenberken, who with her partner, Dutch engineer Paul Kronenberg, founded Braille Without Borders in the Tibetan city of Lhasa 10 years ago. Tenberken and Kronenberg have fought against the ingrained prejudices displayed toward blind people by many Tibetans, who see the sightless as either possessed by demons or paying for sins of a past life.

During her recent tour of the United States with several of her blind students, Tenberken -- who, like Weihenmayer, was not born blind -- says they heard from sightless Americans that they, too, are discriminated against. Which surprised her. They'd expected America to be bias-free. "But it's everywhere," she adds with some resignation.

"Here, it's ignorance," Tenberken says by phone from New York. "There, it's superstition. But superstition can be overcome very, very easily. If they think blindness is a punishment for something done in a past life, all you have to show is how happy and capable these kids are. People will say, 'This cannot be a punishment if they're so happy.' Okay, there are some people who shout at them 'blind fools' or whatever, but Tibetans very, very easily overcome their prejudice, which I'm very grateful for."

Weihenmayer says making some kind of a "statement" about blindness -- one that would affect conditions in Tibet -- wasn't his primary goal at Lhakpa Ri.

"I wanted them to feel what it was like to do something big," he says of the kids. "I wanted them to know what it's like to have big dreams and to fulfill those dreams. It affects the rest of your life."

And the movie? "I've watched it five times now," Weihenmayer says, "and I enjoy it every time. The first time, though, I thought, 'Am I the bad guy in this?' But I've come to like my role."

Some viewers might differ. The conflicts in "Blindsight" arise out of the question of what the climb really means -- to a pair of European social workers vs. a team of goal-oriented American mountain climbers. All agree that reaching the summit of Lhakpa Ri should not supersede the welfare of the kids or the lessons of teamwork. But while people might be able to summit mountains, they can't always suppress their own personalities: As the climb begins to wear down the weaker members of the party, other climbers can't resist their instinct to continue on, and reach the top.

"The climbers call it 'summit fever' and it's really apt," Walker says. "They'd be saying, 'Let's go over there, it's spectacular,' and I'd say, 'Are we doing this for the blind kids? Or for the movie?' Because I was saying: 'We don't need spectacular. We've got spectacular covered. Get people down -- that would be a good part of the movie.' "

Down or up, it's all complicated as far as Weihenmayer is concerned.

"There are hundreds of logistical considerations on a climb like this," he says. "Storms, health issues. You don't want wild cards on an expedition, and the film crew was a wild card all its own."

Also, the school had wanted its own doctor to come along. "Now, I already had Jeff, a physician's assistant; he can prescribe drugs and is the best high-altitude medical person you could have," Weihenmayer says. "And the doctor they brought got a cerebral edema, and one of my people had to like carry the guy 40 hours back down the trail.

"But there are no villains; it's not good versus evil," Weihenmayer says. "It's a case of everyone being right, and just having different ways of doing things."

"I'm not sure it was a cultural conflict," says Tenberken, when it was suggested that the angst in "Blindsight" was about Europe vs. America, or even East vs. West. "But we all went on the climb with different goals, that's for sure. Our goal was more the process, the exchange with Erik, the understanding of teamwork. Our kids are all single fighters: If you know their history, you know they have to have a lot of courage to fight their way back into society. So for them it was most important that they got to exchange with people from other countries, and meet Erik -- they had a very strong bonding with Erik. He's a door-opener for these kids."

Walker had to remain in the conversational DMZ of "Blindsight's" story. Incidentally, she has no sight in her right eye; her left eye was surgically rescued when she was a baby.

"Over Christmas, I had surgery on both eyes," she says. "I used to have extremely thick contact lenses that my eyes couldn't tolerate anymore, so they sort of put the contacts inside my eye. At least that's how it was explained to me." During her recovery, with her eyes bandaged, she was as blind as any of her subjects.

"I was thinking, 'How do they do it?' I tripped, smashed a glass. I couldn't make a phone call. . . . It was a great experience."

It reminded her of an exchange with one of the blind climbers, Tashi. "His name means 'lucky,' although he's the least lucky person I've ever met," Walker says.

"He asked me once, 'Lucy, you know what the best thing is about being blind?' I said, 'I don't know, Tashi, what?' He said, 'I think being blind has forced me to look on the bright side. And that has been very good for me.'

"The last few years haven't been that easy in my life," Walker says. "But when I look at Tashi . . . boy, if Tashi can look on the bright side, we all should."