Doc Talk Podcast: Filmmaker Lucy Walker Treks Everest With Amazing ‘Mountain Queen’, And Inside Doc Contenders Hoping To Scale Emmy Heights
To summit Mount Everest requires incredible tenacity, fitness and a willingness to negotiate the risk of death.
For Lhakpa Sherpa, who has climbed the world’s tallest peak more than any other woman, it has required even more: overcoming poverty, defying her family and Nepali culture that did not support her ambition and surviving an abusive marriage to a fellow mountaineer who nearly killed her.
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Sherpa’s extraordinary story, and her attempt to break her own record for summiting Everest, is told in the Oscar-contending documentary Mountain Queen: The Summits of Lhakpa Sherpa, which debuts in theaters this week before its July 31 premiere on Netflix. Director Lucy Walker, a two-time Academy Award nominee, joins the latest edition of Deadline’s Doc Talk podcast to discuss her film and the remarkable woman at its heart.
Walker (Waste Land, The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom, Blindsight) explains why it was “terrifying” to make her film and why the relationship between Lhakpa and her daughters Sunny and Shiny became such a key part of Mountain Queen. She also tells us why the prospect of ferocious Yetis lurking on Everest almost kept Sherpa from hiking up the mountain.
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In the latest episode of Doc Talk, hosts John Ridley (12 Years a Slave) and Deadline’s documentary editor Matt Carey also unpack the Emmy nominations in the documentary categories. Nominations day brought good news to several previous guests of Doc Talk, like Ron Howard (Jim Henson Idea Man), Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss (Girls State), and Eugene Levy (The Reluctant Traveler with Eugene Levy). Ridley and Carey also discuss the documentaries that could make the leap from the Emmy race to Oscar competition later in the year.
That’s on Doc Talk, the Webby Awards-honored podcast produced by Deadline and John Ridley’s Nō Studios. Listen to the episode above or on major podcast platforms including Spotify, iHeart and Apple.
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