Tenzing screens for the home crowd

2026 has not been an easy year for Nepal and its mountaineering community. 

Celebrity climber Nims Purja and five other Nepalis were killed on Broad Peak in Pakistan on 30 July. Then came the unimaginable horror of the Trisuli Valley flood with the death toll likely to cross 7,000. Last week’s monsoon storms unleashed an avalanche that buried 14 Nepali climbers at Himlung Base Camp, and killed 31 more people across the country.

Although the weather had cleared, the disasters were in the back of the mind of many in the audience for the premier of Tenzing in Kathmandu on Monday. The Apple TV+ biopic is an intimate portrayal of the life and times of Tenzing Norgay, who with Edmund Hillary was the first to summit the world’s highest mountain.

Tenzing is the son of a yak herder from Kharta Valley in Tibet and he is ten years old when the movie shows him meeting George Mallory in 1921 as he explored Chomolungma to find a line to the summit. We do not know whether that actually happened, but the CGI background is of the North Face of Everest and not the East Face that would have been visible from Kharta.

We follow Tenzing in flashbacks as his parents who have lost their yak herd in an epidemic cross over Nangpa La into Nepal, and leave the boy in Tengboche when they go off to search for work. Tenzing now gazed upon Chomolungma from the south, soaring above the Lhotse-Nuptse ridge.

He grows up helping in his guardian’s potato fields, takes a fancy for the daughter of the house and they go off together to Darjeeling (filmed on location in Bandipur) to join mountaineering expeditions. He nearly reaches the top with the Swiss expedition in 1951, but has to wait two years to be a part of the British expedition led by John Hunt (played by the rugged Willem Dafoe).

The expedition camps out at the British Embassy in Lainchaur, and the film was actually shot on location there. The scenes from the higher parts of the mountain were done in the Southern Alps of News Zealand, although care is taken to splice Makalu and Lhotse into the terrain.