In his 2025 film, American director Amir Bar-Lev captures the dramatic race for the final big prize in extreme mountaineering: the first successful winter ascent of K2, Earth’s second-highest mountain. Jackson Hole International Film Festival presents “The Last First: Winter K2” at 6:30 p.m. on Thursday, July 30 at the National Museum of Wildlife Art. Bar-Lev spoke with KHOL film critic Jeff Counts in advance of the screening.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. – Ed.
Jeff Counts: What does the title of your film refer to?
Amir Bar-Lev: It’s got two meanings, but the easy, the low-hanging fruit meaning is that it was about what was considered the final great mountaineering record that could still be attained. As you probably know, most of the highest mountains in the world were summited first in the 1950s. And then in the 1970s-ish people began trying to do those same mountains, but now without oxygen. And over time, people have kind of created different challenges for themselves. One of the more recent challenges is that people are climbing these tremendous alpine peaks higher than 8,000 meters in the winter time. And all of those 14 “eight thousanders” had been summited in the winter, except for one: K2. So that was the last first. In other words, the last great prize of mountaineering. There’s a second meaning to the title which is a kind of a loose borrowing of something in the Bible about those who were last becoming first. Nepalese Sherpas and Pakistanis in the Baltic region who typically have assisted in the glory of usually white Westerners. In this story, the Nepalese were not content to assist the Westerners, but instead they wanted to grab this last first for themselves.
Jeff Counts: It will be hard to avoid comparisons to [Jon Krakauer book and adapted film] “Into Thin Air” because some of the same collisions between pure corporate and tourist mountaineering are present in your film as well. Did you know that’s what you were looking for from the start?
ABL: I welcome those kinds of comparisons, because I love [Jon] Krakauer’s book. I see Krakauer’s book, my documentary, I see them all as part of a kind of a lineage that in some ways goes all the way back to, you could say cave paintings. It’s not unusual that when humans do things that we consider heroic, or we consider them almost to cheat death, we want to talk about it, we want to write about it. We want to make a film about it. This moment we’re in now where you see thousands of people, and it looks like a conga line trying to reach the top of Everest, that happened because of the terrifying events depicted in “Into Thin Air,” not despite that.
JC: Speaking of documentaries, it’s one of the enduring challenges of that kind of filmmaking that anyone can just Google your topic before they see your film. How does that enter into your thinking with regards to structure and pacing?
ABL: I don’t mind that people know something about the film. You asked me about structure. I see it as like peeling an onion. I made a film about [football player turned soldier] Pat Tillman. It started with him dying. And at the time my financiers were saying: ‘Why aren’t you starting with him as a child? How can we even care about this guy? We don’t even know him.” I want to meet the audience where they are and where I was before I started this journey. People have probably heard a little bit about this. It was in the news. That’s how I found out about it. I went on a journey and I look forward to taking an audience on the same journey.
JC: You seem to have access to a lot of spicy moments and strong opinions from that footage. Did you have to fight for all of that or were people pretty forthcoming?
ABL: There was a lot of controversy around the events that are at the heart of this story. This is just after [the police killing of] George Floyd. So there’s a kind of a racial reckoning aspect to this story, there’s also a tension between competition and collaboration. Mountaineering is a funny endeavor. It’s sort of like a sport where there are records and races in the sense. And at the same time, you have to collaborate to a certain degree. People who are nominally in competition with each other might be sharing the same ropes. This is why I find this a great story, because there’s no exact right answer to these things. There’s very compelling questions and you end up kind of asking yourself a lot of questions about your own values and your own morality, which is what I think the great documentary stories can do.
