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.
Tenzing was screened for the home crowd this week at CFX Civil Mall by the British Embassy. The movie will have a theatrical run for a week in the United States before it streams on Apple TV. It is not scheduled for commercial screening in Nepal till next year.
Tenzing is convincingly portrayed by Samdrup Dorje Lama, Tenzin Dalha and Genden Phuntsok in various stages of life. It is a heart-touching story of perseverance, endurance, humility and faith. A lesson that you need not be someone with ego on steroids to dare to dream big and achieve it.
Based on the book by Ed Douglas, the film’s script contrasts the military-style ‘siege’ tactics of an expedition seeking glory for a declining empire with the deep spirituality and reverence for the same mountain that the Europeans are there to ‘conquer’.
We see Tenzing portrayed as an outsider, first by his Nepali Sherpa colleagues, and then by Hunt Sahib who is reluctant to take him on as a full climbing member. But the Kiwis are also treated like outsiders by the Brits, and this bonds Tenzing and Hillary (Tom Hiddleston).
Hunt tries his best to put British climbers on the first summit team, but they are stymied by a cliff which was later named the Hillary Step. The backup team is Hillary and Tenzing, and the rest is mountaineering history. In that sense, we know the ending so the movie lacks suspense. Even so, Tenzing’s family life and his feats on the mountain are dramatised (some would say over-dramatised by poetic license).
The film’s most refreshing side is the portrayal of the first ascent of Chomolungma from a native perspective, in doing so it shifts the perspective from conquering the mountain to surrendering to the mother goddess of the Earth.
Thinley Lhamo of Shambala fame plays Tenzing’s first wife Dawa and Caitríona Balfe is Jill Henderson who was the Honorary Local Secretary of the Himalayan Club in Darjeeling from 1951 to 1956. Both Dawa and Henderson were crucial in inspiring the real-life Norgay, but some scenes are clearly dramatised, including a 10-year-old Tenzing meeting Mallory and trying on his boots, fuelling his lifelong obsession with Chomolungma.
Perhaps those who know their mountains well will notice that Malte Brun Pass and Hochstetter Icefall in New Zealand’s South Island are acting as Everest Base Camp and the Hillary Step. They will also recognise some of the peaks in the summit footage as being from the Southern Alps. Being from Patan myself, I couldn’t help noticing that the expedition started its march to Banepa from Mangal Bazar.
Most viewers will not notice these quirks. The two-hour cinema is beautifully shot, showing both the grandeur of and the risks of climbing the Khumbu Icefall or up into the Death Zone. Norgay uses all his might to rescue Hillary who falls into a crevasse in Western Cwm or when Hillary scales the vertical face that came to be named after him. Interestingly, the Hillary Step collapsed during the 2015 earthquake, and is easier to negotiate.
Tenzing Norgay never felt the need to climb Everest again. This strikes as particularly powerful at a time when the definition of mountaineering has been redefined by those who have climbed the mountain 31 times, or climb all 14 eight-thousanders twice without oxygen (and maybe with exoskeletons and xenon).
The pure challenge to human endurance, stamina and ambition in mountaineering is being reimagined. In one deeply ironical scene, Sherpas on strike at the South Col tell Tenzing they don’t want to go any further because if Everest is climbed, their services will not be required any more.
Through this film, Tenzing Norgay forces us to look back at the history of Himalayan mountaineering, and to ponder where we are and what we have become.
Tenzing
Directed by Jennifer Peedom
Apple Studios, 2026
125 minutes