Touching the Void

The two voices telling this story are real. Joe Simpson and Simon Yates speak to camera about what happened to them, while Brendan Mackey and Nicholas Aaron perform the reconstruction. Some of it was shot at the actual site, Siula Grande in Peru, and the rest in the Alps. In 1985 two young British climbers went up the previously unclimbed west face of Siula Grande. They reached the summit. On the descent Simpson fell and shattered his left leg. Yates began lowering him on a three-hundred-foot rope, but blinded by a blizzard he could not see that Simpson was hanging in space over a cliff. Simpson could not climb back up and Yates could not hold on. Yates cut the rope. The film's strength is that it neither condemns nor absolves that decision. Each man gives his own account, and the viewer is left between them. It premiered at Telluride in 2003, won the BAFTA for Best British Film, and became the highest-grossing British documentary in UK box-office history. Who it is for: viewers who want survival narrative and moral dilemma joined to first-hand testimony. Who it is not for: anyone with a fear of enclosed spaces or heights. The film spends a long time inside a crevasse and offers no relief.