Documentary Revisits the Winter Push Up K2
Director Amir Bar-Lev has spoken about The Last First: Winter K2, a documentary about mountaineers who tried to become the first people to climb K2 in winter. The Hollywood Reporter spoke with him at the SCAD Savannah Film Festival, where the film is part of the Docs to Watch programme.
K2, on the border of Pakistan and China, is the second-highest mountain on Earth. The expedition the film depicts put 60 people on the mountain, according to the same report.
The film does not rest on a crew's footage alone. It uses licensed material shot on iPhones and GoPro cameras, the small devices climbers and filmmakers now carry into high places. Producers had already licensed clips from the filmmaker Elia and from Snorri Sigurjonsson's GoPro before Bar-Lev joined.
Bar-Lev came in about three years after the events he depicts. The producers who brought him on were John Battsek and Sarah Thomson, a married British couple. He has been making documentaries for more than 25 years, and his earlier films include The Tillman Story and Long Strange Trip.
The film was an official selection of the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, a showcase where sales agents and buyers look at new independent work. Sundance described Bar-Lev's background in a profile of the director.
The story also follows a tragedy. The film chronicles the fate of two climbers, Mohammad Ali Sadpara and John Snorri, whose lives ended on the mountain. Their families and the wider climbing community remain at the heart of the subject.
What stands out is how the film was put together. Years of footage from ordinary cameras were gathered and shaped into a single account after the fact, rather than filmed as the climb unfolded. For festival audiences, that method is part of what the programmers and the filmmakers are asking them to consider.
