Sundance ‘26: Commercialism, Competition Breeds Tragedy In ‘THE LAST FIRST: WINTER K2’

In the winter of 2021, a group of 60 climbers—a mix of professional mountaineers, Sherpas, and an uncomfortably large number of novices on a paid expedition—gather at a Himalayan base camp to attempt one of the last unclaimed feats in alpine sport: summiting K2 in winter. The Last First: Winter K2, from documentarian Amir Bar-Lev, charts how this bold collective faces down the mountain, and what it costs them, as competition, commercialism, and outright negligence collide in a perfect storm. Lives are lost, lessons are few, and the takeaway feels grimly simple: mistakes were made.

Bar-Lev centers the story on Icelandic climber John Snorri Sigurjónsson and the Pakistani father-son duo Ali and Sajid Sadpara, whose mission to be the first to summit K2 in winter (already the deadliest peak on Earth) is made even more perilous by the season’s brutality. Enter a commercial expedition and the viral Nepalese climbing sensation Nims Purja, flanked by a small army of Sherpas, and what began as a noble alpine pursuit quickly devolves into a highly televised zoo. One imagines famously reclusive alpinist Marc-André Leclerc, who refused to film his climbs, watching this circus from the great beyond and feeling thoroughly vindicated.

Bar-Lev’s documentary offers sweeping Himalayan vistas and tells the stories of Sigurjónsson, Ali and Sajid Sadpara, and others with a steady hand but it is complicated by its quiet, uneasy attempt to look inward. The Last First seems to recognize its own complicity in what it critiques. The constant presence of cameras, the pressures of social media, and the fact that every team arrives with its own film crew all work to turn something once sacred into just more content. There is a sharp self-reflexivity as the film questions the ethics of documenting extreme trauma and the way death is quietly repackaged as narrative. As something “exciting”. You feel it in real time as smartphones are voyeuristically whipped out and filming while the corpse of a freshly-killed climber rests in a sleeping bag that’s become his makeshift casket.

What unfolds when the teams split up and race to the top is, unsurprisingly, heartbreaking. What they find atop K2 will change all who seek its summit. For some, glory. For others, tragedy. Ultimately, a further string of deaths casts a long shadow over what should have been a historic triumph. The film occasionally dips into unexpected emotional terrain, a contrast to the famously stoic climbers who live with death as a constant companion. I often find myself entranced by films about mountaineers; there’s something magnetic about people who live so precariously close to the edge, who risk everything for a moment above the clouds. But it’s rare to see that edge give way so completely. The Last First doesn’t just show us the cost, it makes us sit with it. Frozen in time forever.

CONCLUSION: A layered documentary about the costs of chasing records in modern mountaineering as the pursuit becomes increasingly “accessible” to paid adventurers. ‘The Last First: Winter K2′ from documentarian Amir Bar-Lev is a foreseeable tragedy of epic proportions with one hell of a backdrop.