Film of the week: Touching the Void

Kevin Macdonald's Touching the Void tells the story of Joe Simpson and Simon Yates on Siula Grande in 1985. Actors play the climb on real mountains, and the two climbers tell it to the camera themselves. The Guardian called it the most successful documentary in British cinema history.

Some shop links on the card earn 7summits.com a small commission, at no extra cost to you.

How the film works

Brendan Mackey plays Simpson, Nicholas Aaron plays Yates and Ollie Ryall plays Richard Hawking, the non-climber who waited at base camp. The reconstructions were filmed in the Alps and in the Peruvian Andes. For the long shots of the fluted snow couloirs of Siula Grande, Simpson and Yates doubled for their younger selves.

Against those pictures, Simpson, Yates and Hawking speak straight to the camera. So the decision to cut the rope is told by the man who made it, and the crawl back to camp by the man who survived it. When they worked on the film in 2002, Simpson and Yates had hardly seen each other for ten years.

It was later listed among PBS's 100 greatest documentaries of all time, and it won the BAFTA for Best British Film. It took almost $14 million worldwide, a large sum for a documentary. Years later the BBC's Film programme named Brendan Mackey's Simpson among the performances that should have won an Oscar.

2003, 106 minutes, directed by Kevin Macdonald. It opened in American cinemas in January 2004.

The book behind it

The film follows Simpson's 1988 book of the same name, which has sold close to two million copies. Touching the Void is in the Library, and so is The Beckoning Silence, the film of a later Simpson book.

Kevin Macdonald

Macdonald was born in Scotland in 1967. He had already won an Oscar for One Day in September, and he went on to make The Last King of Scotland.