Touching the Void
To describe BAFTA winning 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.
Extras – ‘What Happened Next’ tells in their own words how the team made it back home. ‘Return to Suila Grande’ finds both Joe and Simon back at the mountain in the summer of 2002 to advise on the filming. Emotions run high, as Simon seems unable to express his real feelings about the experience, and Joe finds himself painfully reliving the ordeal in his mind, as well as in front of the cameras.
‘It is a breathtakingly beautiful film’ – The Guardian
‘About as close as the average viewer is ever likely to come to the actual experience of assailing a dangerous peak, it will make the crushed ice in your beverage seem unnaturally cold.’ – movie-gazette.com
