"K2. TOUCHING THE SKY" BY ELIZA KUBARSKA

 

 

It is one of these films which start to tug at your heartstrings in one of the first scenes and do not stop until the end. "K2. Touching the Sky" is a documentary film which struggles with powerful, though - it seems - slightly outdated emotions. However, thanks to special participation of the director Eliza Kubarska, her work gets very current, personal dimension, which becomes a stepping stone between tragic events from almost 30 years ago and "here and now."

Summer 1986 is the most splendid season on K2 concerning the number of people who climbed and reached the second highest peak in the world. However, it was also the "black season," because as many as 14 mountaineers died then. Among them, there are the parents of the documentary film's protagonists: Tadeusz Piotrowski, dad of Hania, who then was not yet born, Dobrosława Miodowicz-Wolf, Łukasz's mum, and Julie Tullis from Great Britain, mum of Lindsay and Chris. Almost thirty years after these tragic events, the children of the K2 victims struggle with the most traumatic event in their lives, reaching the foot of Karakoram together with the film's director.

In turns, the protagonists talk about what they felt then and how they approach this tragedy today. Hania is the one who can say the least about it, since she knows her dad only from what her loved ones told her and from numerous books of travel of which he was the author. Łukasz does not have a lot of memories either, because he was only 4 years old when K2 took his mum away. Lindsay and Chris remember quite a lot, because when they lost their mum, they had already understood everything. Eliza Kubarska plays a peculiar role, as she is in part a therapist, in part an inquisitive researcher, because from the words uttered by the protagonists she tries to form the answer to her question: does a mountaineer have the right to be a parent? This is because the director climbs herself, and - as she says in the prologue of the film - her maternal instinct comes into prominence more and more strongly.

"K2. Touching the Sky" enchants the viewers not only by wonderful shots of Karakoram by Radosław Ładczuk and atmospheric music by Michał Jacaszek. The documentary film by Kubarska is, above all, a beautiful study of emotions and a moving story about loss of a loved one, with which each protagonist copes a little bit differently. Copes, because it is a process, as it turns out, which is still unfinished - the Polish-British group visits the plaques dedicated to the memory of their parents, and these confrontations bring about a new wave of intensive feelings.

It is this intensity that prevents the answer to the director's fundamental question from being formed - however, in the film's finale, the author answers it herself, nevertheless emphasising that when dreams and passions come into prominence, no solution is obvious.

Dawid Myśliwiec