Cinema Crossing the Border of Blindness

It happens often to documentary filmmakers who have chosen extremely touching themes for their movies: they get so emotionally involved with a certain social problem that they don’t care about the cinematographic form of showing it any more. That’s how we get documents deeply engaged and nevertheless leaving the viewer cold. But it’s not the case of Lucy Walker and BLINDSIGHT (United Kingdom), which was screened yesterday at Berlinale’s Panorama Section.

This film managed to combine two elements: to treat an emotionally moving task without getting too sentimental and at the same time to use interesting cinematographic language. The chosen filmic language is perfectly related to the story from the very first moment. During a few primary seconds the spectator sees nothing but darkness. He can just hear the sounds of someone walking and mixed voices… Suddenly the picture appears: there’s a deep, icy canyon and a man’s feet seen from a subjective camera. This way, after one single shot, we’re already deeply into the story: not only do we know that a blind guy is climbing a mountain, but also we experience his fear. Unfortunately Walker later forsakes this subjective way and changes into reporting style.

Walker tells us an unbelievable story of blind kids from Tibet and their expedition to Himalayas’ second highest peak. The characters of equal importance to the children are their teacher, German Sabriye Tenberken and mountain climber Eric Weihenmayer with his climbing team. Both Sabriye and Eric went blind when they were teenagers and from then on they treat blindness like a new way of seeing the world, one more challenge, and not as any kind of disability. That’s what Sabriye’s project “Braille without borders” is about: to show the blind they can get wherever they want. She came from her home country to Tibet after discovering that Tibetan society is treating blind as undervalued people. They believe bad karma from past lives takes the sight away. Organizing a climbing trip to the feet of Mount Everest is supposed to help them respect themselves.

Although the idea might seem shocking at first, it really works. The camera follows the team, concentrating on it weakest member, the boy named Tazin. We also watch and listen to the conversations of the climbing team, as they hesitate about what to do next: should they go back or risk the kids’ life?

A few passages are redundant and give the film an educational touch (visualizations of the world map, which shows that Himalayas are the highest mountain, were not really crucial. Some landscapes - beautiful but not very original – could be skipped as well.) Is it really the best way to show how the blind are experiencing climbing a mountain? But surely worth filming were the interiors of Buddhist temples and small villages in Tibet and China which, as Walker mention at her conference, have been never filmed before.

BLINDSIGHT has lot of optimistic conclusions, which we are able to believe in. And there is also one deeply sad touch. It’s just a short scene, but it could actually define the state of being blind. It’s a close up of blind girl’s face as she sits in the cinema: while everybody is laughing, she’s just getting more and more confused. And that’s where we get to a border that’s not possible to cross, even for the cinema.

Malwina Grochowska

© Berlinale Talent Campus 2007