Climbing in Everest

Mount Everest dominates the Mahalangur Himal and marks part of the China–Nepal border; its officially measured height is 8,848.86 m. Renan Ozturk’s personal film in this collection approaches that summit zone not as a straightforward triumph but as a complicated human landscape. The Ghosts Above documents Ozturk as cameraman on an expedition searching for the body of Sandy Irvine and uses that search to examine the mountain’s contemporary realities.

Rather than a pure summit narrative, the film turns attention to the Northeast Ridge’s congestion, the economics of guided expeditions, and the oddity of hunting for a long-dead climber at extreme altitude. Ozturk’s cinematography—widely noted for painterly compositions—captures both the desolate beauty at eight thousand metres and the cramped, logistical choreography below the summit. Scenes of the summit push, filmed when breathing is a scarce commodity, bring viewers closer to the physiological and visual limits of high-altitude mounting.

The result reads as a reflective record: it documents a specific search and a particular aesthetic stance on Everest, showing how contemporary expeditions negotiate crowding, cost, and the practicalities of operating near Earth’s highest point.