See No Ego

Mountaineer Erik Weihenmayer and Tibetan student Tashi during their expedition on the Himalayan mountain Lhakpa Ri. (Robson Entertainment)

This is how it can sound to be blind in Tibet, the Rooftop of the World:

“Look out, morons.”

“You deserve to eat your father’s corpse.”

Cruel taunts such as these, heard near the beginning of Lucy Walker’s tremendous documentary Blindsight, are common in the streets of Lhasa and other Tibetan communities. One in 70 Tibetans is blind, a per capita rate that’s twice the global average. The main reason is high-altitude sun exposure. But according to the country’s cultural dogma, blindness is either the result of demonic possession or a punishment for the sins of a past life.

“It’s really hard to convey how stigmatized blind people are in Tibet, how low expectations are for them. To tie [blind children] to a bed so they don’t hurt themselves would be a compassionate way for them to spend the day,” says Walker, seated in a downtown Toronto hotel, just hours before her doc’s world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Blindsight depicts the mountaineering adventures of six classmates from Tibet’s first school for blind children. The teenagers, led by a blind American climber and their German-born school teacher, embark on an expedition to the summit of Lhakpa Ri (7,045 metres), a Himalayan giant that rises in the shadow of the almighty Everest (8,850 metres).

Walker arrived for the interview within moments of two of Blindsight’s eight major characters: the mountaineer and the teacher, Erik Weihenmayer and Sabriye Tenberken. They have not visited with each other since shooting wrapped in November 2004 but all are overjoyed by the reunion.

Weihenmayer, now 37, was born with a genetic eye disease that cannot be treated with medication or surgery. His sight diminished to total blindness by the time he was 13; his mother died in a car crash soon after his fade to black. Erik’s father held the family together by schooling his three young sons in the life-or-death teamwork of mountaineering.

In May 2001, Weihenmayer became the first blind person to conquer Everest. Sixteen months later, the Colorado native completed the Seven Summits, an ultimate athletic challenge accomplished by climbing the highest peaks on each of the planet’s seven continents. (About 150 mountaineers have managed the feat. Save for Weihenmayer, all are sighted.)

Schoolteacher Sabriye Tenberken, one of the subjects of the film Blindsight.

(Steve Carty/CBC)

Tenberken is a different sort of role model, more accustomed to moving mountains than climbing them. She is close in age to Weihenmayer, and became blind near the same time as he did due to a similar degenerative disease.

Blindness has never diminished Tenberken’s ambitions. In 1997, she travelled through Tibet via horseback, searching for neglected blind children in its isolated villages. She met her future husband, Paul Kronenberg, who is Dutch and sighted, during that trip. The following year, while working toward her master’s degree in Central Asian Sciences at Bonn University, Tenberken was bothered by the absence of a Braille script for Tibetan language. She decided to invent her own — and completed the project in two weeks.

“Every person has something they might be ashamed about. Why not accept that as one of their qualities, as one of the things that belong to their character? Immediately, in the moment when they accept this as belonging to them, then they can overcome it and put it into something really beautiful and strengthening,” Tenberken says. “Sometimes I feel sorry for the ones who don’t have such an obvious obstacle like blindness. Blindness is so obvious, and it’s therefore much, much easier to overcome. But people who have problems with socializing or people who are depressed, these are not obvious things.”

Tenberken and Kronenberg became the co-founders of Braille Without Borders, an organization that aims to empower blind students by teaching them literacy, languages and the life skills they will need to negotiate the sighted world. The couple opened its first school together in Lhasa, then became its main teachers.

“If you’re literate, you have the possibility to get integrated or to integrate yourself into society,” Tenberken says. “Without Borders means that we are not only focusing on Tibet, but we can practically work worldwide, because blind people are everywhere. Without Borders also has another meaning — that we don’t want to set borders for blind people.”

As Blindsight shows, it’s just the opposite. The Lhasa school’s enrolment had grown to about 30 live-in students when news of Weihenmayer’s Everest summit spread through Tibet. The American mountaineer became the students’ instant, unshakeable hero.

Tenberken invited Weihenmayer to visit BWB’s school and meet its students. He decided to do that and more. Weihenmayer re-assembled the team of sighted American climbing guides that had helped him to the summit of Everest. They began planning to lead some of BWB’s students on a monumental climbing expedition on their own. Next, Weihenmayer contacted film producer Sybil Robson-Orr to pitch her on a documentary about the journey. She was hooked after one meeting, and tapped Walker — whose Devil’s Playground had been a hit at Sundance in 2002 — to direct.

Upon arriving in Lhasa, Weihenmayer helped select six students, aged 14 to 19,  to attempt the climb on Lhakpa Ri. He then partnered each of them — Kyila, Sonam Bhumtso, Gyenshen, Dachung, Tenzin and Tashi — with one of his American guides.

Tibetan student Sonam Bhumtso during a training climb that she and her classmates undertook before their expedition on Lhakpa Ri. (Robson Entertainment)

Walker’s storytelling does a fine job of cutting between the expedition and the students’ farewell trips to their family homes. Lhakpa Ri is less dangerous than Everest, but any team venturing up the Himalayas risks altitude sickness and other calamities. Weihenmayer points out the danger of an avalanche.

Blindsight omits the gruelling work of Walker’s two film crews (and the Sherpas who carted their cameras and tripods). The U.K. director’s preferred style is cinéma-vérité, which typically involves shooting as much footage as possible. On Lhakpa Ri, getting the shots she wanted meant racing ahead of the climbers, filming their passage and then skipping ahead of them again to repeat the process. To make matters more difficult, Walker broke her ankle a few months before the expedition. The injury lingered as they started the expedition, then stopped healing altogether as the climbers reached higher, less-oxygenated air.

“Altitude is really rough. I have such respect for mountaineers. Up there, you don’t eat, you don’t sleep. Your head pounds. Nothing relieves that pounding,” Walker says. “Everyone’s personality changes — most markedly irritability, which is always a delight in a large group of people. And you just can’t think clearly. It is physically and mentally exhausting to tie your shoelaces, let alone climb while thinking about interview questions and camera angles.”

Blindsight improves as the stress of the climb sets in. Weihenmayer and Tenberken’s groups begin to debate the expedition’s purpose. The Americans can sense the summit and are eager to reach it. Tenberken and Kronenberg, though, see their kids becoming sick and listless. The children would rather enjoy Lhakpa Ri’s smells and sounds, they insist, than risk the danger of pushing on to its peak.

“I always asked the question, ‘What’s in it for the kids?’ And this question was not answered by any of [the American climbers] in a proper way,” Kronenberg tells me. The discussions that are shown in Blindsight are always amicable, but nonetheless reveal a clash between the goals of West versus East, Americans versus Europeans, the sighted versus the blind. The film builds to a suspenseful conclusion that won’t be revealed here, but be assured that Blindsight is this year’s Murderball: An unconventional, outstanding athletic documentary that inspires new faith in human potential.

Tenberken praises her students for the confidence they have gained since the expedition. Kyila has assumed many of the responsibilities of running the school in Lhasa. Others have taken up residence at BWB’s farm project, midway along the road between Lhasa and Kathmandu. They have opened a coffee shop and are now preparing plans for a hotel. (Which, Tenberken reports, they intend to call the Braille Without Borders Get Together and Feel Great Hotel.)

The students’ increased role in BWB’s operations has allowed Tenberken and Kronenberg to focus on their newest ambition, a training centre in India that will teach blind people from developing countries how to create and maintain social projects in their own communities. They have a five-year plan to put the centre into operation.

The students back in Lhasa, their teachers are certain, have learned how to climb new heights on their own. “They are innovative. They are creative. They know that they have to go their own way and cannot just copy our way,” Tenberken says. “They want to continue in their own way, and this is nice, isn’t it?”

Blindsight screens at TIFF on Sept. 15.

Matthew McKinnon writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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