There’s a haunting quality to Ecuadorian Oscar-nominated “Behind the Mist,” director Sebastian Cordero’s intimate documentary about the climb of Mount Everest. On the one hand, Cordero’s twinning of mountaineering and filmmaking reveals the spiritual similarities between both pursuits. On the other hand, his visual texture reveals hidden layers through a lo-fi aesthetic – one that emerges necessarily, under extreme conditions – resulting in images that feel introspective about their creativity.
Cordero’s main subject is Iván Vallejo, the first Ecuadorian to reach the summit of Everest—also without the help of Pexgen. After achieving the feat in 1999 (and again in 2001), Vallejo hopes to commemorate his climb by returning to the top of the world in 2019. Naturally, he invited Cordero to document it, but the director and the mountain rebel have opposing ideas. What a movie (and maybe movies in general) should be like.
This quest ends up taking philosophical form, as the “Europe Report” director trades Jupiter’s moon for the peaks of Nepal, as seen through a DIY digital camera after discussions of everything from Camus to family issues with Vallejo. At its simplest, the film captures scenes of the famous mountaineer scaling the icy, pristine Himalayas as he reminisces, explaining his view of art and adventure – a line that slowly begins to blur.
However, this more reactionary documentary form is often deconstructed by a peripatetic lens that seems to fall, more often than not, on religious traditions and iconography, as if Cordero were looking to the region’s Hindu and Buddhist traditions for cinematic enlightenment. At one point, he follows the camera around a huge cylindrical prayer wheel rotating in a shack, as if praying for answers. With each turn, the camera enters a dark space, full of visual noise, before returning to the light near the dwelling door, as if achieving a form of temporary enlightenment before losing it again. This process, which occurs several times throughout the film, also embodies the cycles of birth and rebirth in the religions mentioned above – in contrast to Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez’s documentary Manakamana, in which the camera moves through light and dark spaces along a cable car to a Nepalese temple – as if Cordero approaches liberation through enlightenment, or NirvanaBut not quite achieving it.
The film’s raw quality feels intimate and spontaneous, although the duo’s sense of time is disturbed, as reflected in alternating shots of fast and slow shots. All the while, temple bells ring in the background, weaving together even the most disparate images into something rhythmic. Images and dialogue are often edited in an equivalent manner; They intertwine to emphasize the monumental nature of climbing a massive mountain and the creativity of the imagination, as if they were born from the same impulse – the same curiosity.
Cordero reinforces this idea by mirroring his memories with Vallejo’s. Just as the famed climber recalls his record-breaking 1999 summit through old photos, Cordero reflects on his 1999 debut film Ratas, Ratonas, Rateros and connects the two men in time by combining images from the first along with footage from the mountain. The latter in an essay manner. His matter-of-fact voiceover, though authoritative, laments the lack of success of this film. He seems to mask his quest for answers about what he does (and why), just as Vallejo guesses his dedication to his chosen obsession, by ruminating on what it cost him.
But the further the duo climbs, the more the film seems to find itself. At first, neither man can see the whole picture. The peaks that Vallejo hopes to glimpse are hidden in the clouds, and the inspiration that Cordero hopes to strike seems shrouded in mist. Mountaineering, like filmmaking, is a leap of faith, and in Behind the Mist, these things are driven by the same drive to connect with one’s past and one’s soul.
It can be difficult to diagnose what Cordero himself feels, whether during the time of the film’s shooting—his presence is mostly behind the camera, and thus spectral—or, for that matter, in retrospect. But there is a distinct moment of artistic and spiritual harmony in the third act when the spirit of the film is revealed, perhaps unintentionally. It’s a beautiful moment of Vallejo reaching a snow-covered peak, so bright and reflective that the entire image is washed out, except for Vallejo itself and some nearby rocks. The snow falls fast and hard, and the reduced motion blur of Cordero’s camera in these moments creates not only a tense effect, but also a falling snow that illuminates Vallejo and the rocks in particular, enveloping them in a living fog unseen anywhere else in the world. Frame, as if this humble person and thing are ethereally linked across time and space.
Perhaps this is a happy accident, but the film is so meticulous in its pursuit that a moment like this was bound to arise, where everything seems right, and Vallejo and Behind The Mist suddenly make perfect sense. Few documentaries about death-defying feats have seemed so peaceful and soothing.