Three Films Make A Post: Some Live to Climb. They Climb to Live

Sherpa (2015): What starts as a bit of a picture postcard paean to the Sherpas – particularly the nearly record book touching mountain guide Phurba Tashi Sherpa - doing all the hard work for the hordes of hardcore tourists packaged by professional climbing businesses, turns serious after the great avalanche of 2014 kills sixteen Sherpas. Growing anger and frustration with the danger and exploitation inherent in the work lead to what’s really a strike movement. Director Jennifer Peedom raises to the unplanned occasion and turns out to be just as good at getting people who really aren’t into sharing their inner feelings to talk and to explain, showing how capitalism ruins everything – even the ability for some decent people to be honest to themselves - as she is at filming spectacular climbing scenes. Much of the film suggests the filmmakers truly care about the Sherpas and their situation.

The only element of it I’d criticize is its overuse of a clichéd and treacly emotionally manipulative score by Antony Partos that’s so over the top, it sometimes sounded like satire to my ears.

Slash/Back (2022): Nyla Innuksuk’s Inuktitut teen horror movie is a little wonder. Wearing some of its influences proudly on its sleeve – or rather, it feels like on its heart – it uses these influences to make the kind of horror film that has all the good qualities of local/regional horror filmmaking of decades ago. So expect the local applied to genre tropes, on one hand, to make both strange and new, on the other to be able to talk about things – here the lives and feelings and divisions between young Inuktitut girls living in the kind of small town at the polar circle where a solstice dance is pretty much the most exciting thing their parents generation experiences in a year.

Innuksuk touches her scenes with a light hand, never letting them getting swallowed by the horror tropes, but also never going the other way either. So things stay fun but never dumb, unless dumbness is point of the fun.

Alta tensione: Il gioko aka School of Fear (1999): The late 90s were not a good time to make horror or giallo in Italy. Still, Lamberto Bava did from time to time manage to get some money for a mini series anthology or two from Italian TV, like the series this fine TV movie is part of. It is often cleverly written (by Roberto Gandus and of course Dardano Sacchetti), using creepy kids tropes as well as a discomfort with conservative institutions to great effect, finishing ambiguous and dark, and surprisingly coherent.

Bava’s direction often creates genuinely suspenseful and creepy moods, usually finding some way to make every scene more interesting and effective. There’s also some fine locations work, which you don’t always get in TV work.