Sherpa is a documentary about the 2014 Everest climbing season, it follows mountain guide Phurba Tashi, here titular Sherpa. He has summited the mountain 21 times since he started guiding in 1999, equalling the world record. This year he’s due his 22nd. That’s the basic premise and probably the story the filmmakers set out to tell, one of a brave and experienced Sherpa. Someone whose life and work was climbing peaks. But that’s not the story they found.

The film starts with Phurba’s wife lamenting that she’s asked him so many times not to back to Everest, his mother says climbing the mountain is an affront to it, one that will surely be punished. His family think the risk outweighs the reward. That any other job would be better and safer. This is contrasted by western mountaineers and ‘journalists’ mythicising the Nepalese people, making them out as superstitious, as having no comprehension of why millionaires climb the mountain. They speak to the Nepalese in wikipedia simple English, while expressing respect, acknowledging that this whole economy, all of this climbing is impossible without Sherpas. However they’re still adopting that tone, belittling their professed heroes.

The film crawls along with this tension, quietly highlighting the hypocrisy and that’s all it might have been, then, 16 Sherpas are killed in an avalanche while ascending Everest. They were carrying supplies for the tourists, in a previous scene we’d seen hot towels handed out, TV’s and books carried up for entertainment. The documentary crew keep working, filming the response. There are images of a helicopter ferrying survivors back to basecamp, to temporary safety. After it begins to bring home the dead. The accident is horrifying, everyone speaks of having seen it coming, of knowing that it were possible and still being deeply affected by it.

Then as quickly as it happened, the westerners want to go back to climbing, to resume their largely pointless treks to an entirely arbitrary point on a peak. It’s barely been a day and they’re asking the Sherpa’s to walk over the ice their friends died on. Not all the bodies were even found, a tragedy, a gravesite, lies between them and the summit. Yet some media company wants to do their livestream, some modern hippies want to find new age enlightenment and everyone needs the Sherpas to get them there. So the Sherpas go on strike and the westerners fucking loose it.

They switch from idealising the locals to open belittlement, claiming ‘a few hot heads’ are behind the strike, that the Sherpas want to climb. One of the tour leaders says that the younger Sherpas will break the legs of the others if they climb. When asked in private interviews about this, every Sherpa responses that they just need more money and better conditions and they can’t climb this year. They don’t challenge the obvious lies, just state the facts and stand together. The Sherpas win, the westerners leave and the season is over. 2014 became the last year Phurba Tashi climbed Everest, he retired from the mountain, or at least attempts to summit it and Sherpa went from documentary about mountaineering to a labour rights piece.

Some of the best documentaries spring to existence like this, from documentarians following the story they find, not the one they went looking for. Sherpa has this slow build to it, the early stuff of westerns nearly admitting they see the Nepalese as little more than equipment, supposing that they knew nothing of such pursuits before the west arrived. It’s so prophetic, they’re begging to be educated and it’s horrific that even after 16 deaths and a strike, they don’t seem to listen.

Everests status as a graveyard is nothing new. Part of the mountain is nicknamed ‘rainbow valley’ in reference to the multicoloured clothing worn by the bodies that cover it. Who hasn’t heard of ‘Green Boots’ the corpse of a climber turned climbing landmark waiting below the summit. 100’s of people have died on the mountain, many were foreign climbers yes, but countless others were just trying to make some money, to better their situation.

Seeing direct action like this, seeing people form an impromptu union and take things into their own hands, it’s always emotional. These circumstances and the unapologetic bold faced lies told by western tour operators and their multimillionaire clients. That they’re just willing to go on camera and balance little more than a holiday against the life and death of the people who live here. It’s just too obvious. It’s a situation that plays out everywhere all over the world and history, but there are few times it’s so graphic, the exploration so raw, obvious.

I’ve talked before about cave diving disasters being ‘guilt free’ true crime and I think you could almost put mountaineering disasters being similar. But here, at the top of the world, we see the reality. Where someones half backed plan to ‘conquer’ a mountain, by posting a snowy selfie to instagram from a summit they’ll leave seconds later. Has a human cost.