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Blindsight

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by Juliette Goursat
Set in the impressive and majestic Himalayas, Lucy Walker’s Blindsight follows the captivating trek of six blind Tibetan teenagers who decide to climb the 23,000-foot Lhakpa Ri on the north side of Mount Everest. In this adventure, the children are flanked by Sabriye Tenberken, their blind German educator, who rescued them and created the only school for the blind in Tibet, the famous blind mountaineer Erik Weihenmayer, and American sighted athletes.

Blindsight immediately stands out through the greatness of its story, the absolute beauty of its setting and its powerful characters. In Tibet, blind children are shunned by society. People believe they are possessed by demons: blindness is not only considered to be physical but above all spiritual. These children convey a frailty counterbalanced by an intense energy, and an extraordinary longing to exist and be recognized, which makes their story all the more moving.

The film’s other accomplishment lies in its construction and the evolution of the relations between all these disparate personalities, who form an amazingly odd group of trekkers. While the journey becomes harder and harder for the children, who are more vulnerable and suffer from the bad weather conditions and the altitude sickness, the American super-athletes still want to keep on and reach the peak of the summit – a sportive performance which obviously doesn’t make any sense for these kids. These cultural discrepancies are exacerbated by the gradual revelation of the past of the kids – badly treated, rejected by their parents – as incursions into the main narrative of the film. However, what eventually prevails is a feeling of hope, the acceptance of difference and the possibility of creating links between Eastern and Western cultures – a solidarity metaphorically embodied by the rope used by the trekkers to attach themselves to each other.
The film skilfully begins with a black screen sequence in which we can only hear sounds. For a few seconds, we are confronted with blindness in what we can feel to be a hostile and dangerous environment. The soundtrack is also really finely worked: director Walker aspires to make her film “enjoyable for blind people”.

But where the film stumbles is in the expression of what the children feel and perceive beyond the physical pain provoked by the altitude. They talk very little – and most of the time in English. At one point, Sabriye addresses this topic and says that blindness is “constant imagination”. Blindsight falls a little bit short in the clues it should provide us to avoid being in the awkward position in which we observe people who can’t see us and go into raptures about a landscape which doesn’t exist for most characters as we perceive it. We therefore vacillate between a huge empathy, an almost naïve ‘tearful’ feeling for these kids as we comprehend what the journey represents for them, and a distance due to this lack of information.

Despite this small and subtle reserve, Blindsight deals admirably with the social representation of blindness and the necessity to re-examine our point view. Bearer of equality, togetherness and hope, it deserves to be seen and above all listened to!
Directed by Lucy Walker, UK 2007, 104 mins

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