Touching The Void [DVD] [2003]

Kevin MacDonald's ('A Day in September') docu-drama is based on a true story. In 1985 two ambitious young British mountaineers, Joe Simpson and Simon Yates, set off to scale the treacherous west face of the Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes. They reached the summit on day three, but shortly after starting the descent Simpson fell and broke his leg badly. This accident turned their daring expedition into a desperate fight for survival, when Yates had to decide whether to stay with Simpson and wait to be rescued (and possibly die) or leave him behind to save his own life.

To describe Touching the Void as a mountaineering documentary would be to do this breathtaking drama an injustice. By intercutting narration from the climbers themselves with a nail-biting reconstruction of their remarkable adventure in the Peruvian Andes, the film has the best of both genres: the authentic stamp of factual storytelling and the edge-of-the-seat tension of a dramatic movie.

In 1985, two British mountaineers, Joe Simpson and Simon Yates, embarked on a daring--arguably reckless in the extreme--attempt to climb the previously unconquered mountain Suila Grande. A mixture of overconfidence in their own abilities and underestimation of the climb's difficulties brought them to grief after the successful slog to the summit. What follows is an often harrowing account of their perilous descent, during which Joe horribly shatters his leg and Simon is forced to cut the support rope on which Joe's life, quite literally, is hanging by the proverbial thread. It's no secret that both climbers lived to tell the tale, but at every stage the audience will be left guessing just how the crippled Simpson could possibly have found the inner strength to surmount each deadly trial.

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