Movie Review - 'Blindsight'

Blindsight

Featuring Erik Weihenmayer
Directed by Lucy Walker
Rated PG

There are times when you just feel very small. Watching Blindsight makes you - or made me - feel pretty insignificant. There are so many wonderful stories woven into this film that it's hard not to marvel, not to shake your head, not to be choked up.

But Blindsight has a rare humility about it that makes what is accomplished in the film all the more rare and special.

A documentary that at its center features the highest point in the world, overcoming disability and overcoming cultural differences in support of a common goal. In 2002, Erik Weihenmayer became the first blind person to climb Mt. Everest, and he has since become one of roughly 100 people to climb the seven highest peaks on Earth.

But that's not really the story, although it could be. We'll consider it, in climbing lingo, our base camp. We can simply be amazed at the wherewithal of Erik Weihenmayer who not let blindness keep him from doing something that nearly 100% of the world's sighted population is too afraid to try.

Blindsight goes further, however. When Weihenmayer was approached by the Tibetan school Braille Without Borders, he agreed to lead a team of blind Tibetan teens on a similar quest, straight up to the top of Mt. Everest. And that would make one hell of a movie on its own...but Blindsight takes it one step further.

Director Lucy Walker allows us to see the differences between this part of the third world and our own. The blind students, you might be interested to learn, are viewed as being possessed by demons in their homeland, and given the agricultural nature of this country that has still not fully embraced the 20th Century - to say nothing of the 21st -the children are seen as borderline useless because they can't do farm work. Rejected even by their Buddhist religion, these children have a very grim forecast until Braille with Borders changes their lives.

It's hard to imagine a film that can be so instructive, awe-inspiring and inspirational all at once. Blindsight manages to do all three, reminding you that the limits for the power of film doesn't stop at the top of the world.