Films and documentaries about climbing often come down to life and death situations, given the extremely dangerous nature of the subject.
And the legacy of a Polish mountaineer, Maciej Berbeka, is being re-explored through a new drama film on Netflix called Broad Peak. Berbeka was one of the country’s best and most adventurous climbers, however, his life ended in tragedy.
As the film attempts to tell his story, here’s the true events that inspired the movie:
Maciej Berbeka was born in Poland in 1954, and quickly became an established mountaineer. As well as becoming part of International Federation of Mountain Guide Associations and the Polish search and rescue squad, he also was known for being a member of the Ice Warriors, described by DW as: “Polish specialists who dominated the winter mountaineering scene, especially in the 1980s, when they achieved the first seven winter first ascents of eight-thousanders.”
His climbs
Berbeka focused in on winter ascents of the 14 global 8,000ft mountains; a tricky season to climb, as DW explains: “Due to the extremely low temperatures, particularly low air pressure, storms, and deep snow, winter mountaineering on eight-thousanders was long considered far too demanding and dangerous.”
However, in 1984, he hit the summit of Manaslu in the Nepalese Himalayas – without using supplemental oxygen – followed by Cho Oyu in the Himalayas, 20 kilometres from Mount Everest, a year later. His other triumphs included conquering Annapurna and Mount Everest.
On March 6, 1988, he became the first person in the world to reach Karakoram’s Rocky Summit, one of its five peaks, on the border of Pakistan and China, in winter. 25 years on in 2013, he decided to do the climb again, this time to the Broad Peak summit, with Adam Bielecki, Tomasz Kowalski and Artur Małek. In the film he vocalises his reasons for wanting to pursue a do-over of the mission, as he didn’t quite hit the true peak before: “It’s hard to live with the feeling you’re a fraud. For 25 years I’ve been trying to get rid of that.”
While the team managed to make it to the peak on 6 March, the alarms went up when Berbeja, then 58, and Kowalski, then 27, failed to make it to Camp 4, at 7,400 metres, on the descent back down. They were declared missing.
A rescue party was sent out, but it only lasted two days before Berbeja and Kowalski were declared dead, despite their bodies not being found. At the time, Krzysztof Wielicki, leader of the winter expedition of Polish Mountaineering Association, released a statement saying: “Considering all the circumstances, conditions, my experience, history of Himalayan mountaineering, knowledge regarding physiology and high-altitude medicine as well as consultations with doctors and co-organizers of the expedition in Poland, I have to declare Maciej Berbeka and Tomasz Kowalski dead.
“Taking into account the time that has passed since the last contact, altitude where it took place, their condition, current weather conditions and all other factors, I have to claim openly that both climbers are dead…The expedition has come to an end”.
Just four months later, three more men died trying to reach the summit of Broad Peak, the Iranian climbers Aidin Bozorgi, Pouya Keivan, and Mojtaba Jarahi, who once again went missing on the descent, and the top of the mountain is thought to be one of the most dangerous in the world.
Director Leszek Dawid told Screen Daily about his hopes for his film: “I’d like Broad Peak to be a story about a man struggling against nature, cold fear, exhaustion… for the viewers to get close enough to the protagonist to understand this yearning. In order to help them relate to the main character, I’m going to make use of the subjective narration by letting them gradually take Berbeka’s point of view.”
Broad Peak streams on Netflix from September 14.