There were many moments in her biography that are worth taking a look at.
The best ones – as the first person from Poland to climb Everest, as the first woman to climb K2.
Tragic – a mine kills her little brother, her father is murdered by thieves.
Dramatic – for example the day when lightning strikes in the summit dome of Nanga Parbat and Wanda and her partners’ hair stands on end.
– The moments when you are close to death are the most powerful experiences that people can experience. Survive your own death… – says Rutkiewicz.
However, Rutkiewicz looks at Kubarska at a completely different moment, perhaps the most interesting one. Wanda is trying to get out of another emotional hole after the death of the man who was supposed to be the one and with whom, despite her mature age, she planned to have children.
He is 49 years old, he looks carefully at himself and his desires, he tries to express them, and we hear it thanks to the recordings made available to the director by Wanda’s sister.
Would she be a good mother?
Why can’t he still enjoy the moment?
– I was simply born with a certain feature that doesn’t make life any easier. His characteristic feature is that he is constantly not satisfied with what he has. And what you have becomes valuable when you can lose it. So I don’t live in the present tense. I live either in the past or the future. On the way to him. I’m on my way to look for something, says Rutkiewicz.
There is a universal truth in her reverie about the inability to focus on the present; a truth spoken in the distant past of the early 1990s, free from interruptions and FOMO. What would Wanda say about all this today?
A caravan to dreams
At this special moment in her life, she comes up with a media-friendly project – so far she has conquered six eight-thousanders, and she intends to climb the remaining eight within one year. He calls it a “dream caravan” and hits the road. If she succeeds, she will set new trends in the speed of climbing eight-thousanders and become the first woman to climb the Crown of the Himalayas and the Karakoram.
He climbs two peaks, the next one is Kanchenjunga. He sets off for the summit attack with Mexican Carlos Carsolio. She walks slower than him and when he comes down from the top, she is still over 300 meters away. It’s two hours away at a good pace, but she’s tired and wants to rest. Then Carsolio sees her for the last time, but, as Kubarska explains in the film, he has no right to bother her.
Wanda disappears, her body was never found. What happened to her? This question, which has been driving journalists and book authors in recent years, is also driving Kubarska, who decides to go to Nepal and find the traces of Rutkiewicz.
Is it possible, as Wanda’s mother believed, that her daughter left Kanchenjunga and hid in some Buddhist monastery?
The question itself is sensational, but it is not even the question, but rather the way in which Kubarska asks it, and to whom she asks it, that makes us get the most interesting documentary about the mountains in recent years.
Kubarska does not ask the rational Western world about Wanda’s fate. Instead, he talks about it with people who have been associated with the Himalayas for centuries, who were born and died in the shadow of Kanchenjunga, who do not rule out a miracle and without blinking an eye consider what Rutkiewicz’s life in the monastery could have been like.
Thanks to this approach, “The Last Expedition” retains a mystery that is often blurred in other films about mountains, filled with drone shots, which will probably replace AI-generated frames in a few years.
Fumbling around in the details
Instead of flying a drone, Kubarska searches Nepalese warehouses, where papers from past expeditions are crumpled in old bags, and then, with a caravan of yaks, she reaches the harsh villages near Kanchenjunga.
He meticulously documents the smallest details of Wanda’s mysterious disappearance, as if obliged to check whether something has been forgotten, whether some new clue may be hidden in the red barrel that the Sherpas bought from Polish climbers a long time ago.
Kubarska asks about trifles and does not allow for shallow assessments, defending her heroine against the vivisection of climbers from the golden 1980s, with whom Rutkiewicz had various conflicts. In this film, Wanda talks about herself, with the calm voice of a woman reconciled with her fate. Or maybe it’s just image creation, something Rutkiewicz was a master at?
She is familiar with death – over half a century, 30 people died, with whom she was either tied with a rope or with their lives. She had to count it, no one shoots that number. Without blinking an eye, she also answers questions about emancipation and whether people cry like women in the mountains. It’s hard to provoke her or surprise her. This image only vibrates when Wanda tries to talk about love. The one for another person, because Rutkiewicz talks about his greatest love with unwavering certainty.
Wanda says: – One of the most important things for me is my freedom. This is not anarchy. It is mental freedom to be able to think what I think and not to have to worry that what I think may be misheard. So that I can choose what I want and not be forced to do something.
Eliza Kubarska’s film opens the Millennium Docs Against Gravity 2024 documentary film festival.
Source: Gazeta
Bruce is a talented author and journalist with a passion for entertainment . He currently works as a writer at the 247 News Agency, where he has established himself as a respected voice in the industry.
