Every year I go to UK documentary film festival Sheffield Doc Fest, and every year there's one doc that absolutely blows me away — this year I was lucky enough to see two such movies and one of them was a Netflix movie that you can now watch on the streamer.
This movie is called Mountain Queen: The Summits of Lhakpa Sherpa, which hit Netflix today (that's Wednesday, July 31, if you're reading this from the future). It wasn't made by Netflix but had worldwide distribution acquired by the streamer after it debuted at Toronto Film Festival.
Mountain Queen is about a Nepali woman called Lhakpa Sherpa — years ago, she was the first woman to ever survive an ascent and descent of Mount Everest, but now she works at a supermarket in Connecticut to support her family.
Over the course of Mountain Queen we learn about her history, and what happened to take her from Queen of Everest to working at a Whole Foods. We also follow as she decides to return to the mountain, to make her tenth ascent, as her two daughters learn more about their mother and the father that they barely remember.
What's great about Mountain Queen is that it's not just a mountaineering documentary. It's also a family drama, an educational history movie and at times a crime thriller too. Don't look at the preview and assume it's just for people who like their real-life adventure docs.
What turns Mountain Queen from being a great documentary into a fantastic one is its subject, Lhakpa Sherpa. She's an incredibly charismatic and upbeat character to follow, whether she's trying to wrangle her distant daughters or struggling with issues half-way up the face of Everest. Her personality ensures that, no matter how dark or upsetting the topic of each section of the documentary (and there are some pretty upsetting topics), we're guided through by her optimistic and perky attitude. You just want to keep watching her!
Lhakpa Sherpa actually spoke at the screening of the movie I attended, alongside her two daughters who are also important parts of the movie, and it's evident that her personality wasn't created just for the documentary — there's no artifice there.
There are countless Netflix mountaineering movies, but Mountain Queen stands above them all off the back of Lhakpa Sherpa's personality. It's also interesting to see a mountain doc from the perspective of a woman, instead of a man like the majority of the others, as it shows some unique obstacles that many other similar movies I've seen don't explore.
Usually when I watch a movie, I decide my opinion on it once it's over and I'm out of the theater / off the sofa. However Mountain Queen is really rare in that I was completely caught up in the swell and flow of emotions through the story, and it's really impressive that the movie got me anxious about someone reaching the top of a mountain... that they'd already summited nine times before!
If you're going to watch one thing on Netflix this week, make sure it's Mountain Queen: The Summits of Lhakpa Sherpa. It easily earns a place on the list of the best Netflix documentaries, and should really be in contention for some Oscars too.
PS — if you're wondering what the other mind-blowing documentary was that I mentioned in the introduction, it's one called Stone Mountain (a new one for 2024, not the PBS or Atlanta History Center ones). That doesn't seem to have any distribution confirmed at the time of writing, but perhaps when it does, I'll write a similarly effusive article for it!
