Teens get view of their worth despite disability in ‘Blindsight’

By John Anderson

There are enough good stories for three movies in Lucy Walker’s “Blindsight,” an exhilarating trip with six blind Tibetan teenagers as they scale one of the highest peaks in the Himalayas.

Blindsightthemovie.com

Sonam, a blind teenager from Tibet, scales an incline in the Himalayas in “Blindsight.”

Stigmatized and insulted within their Buddhist culture, blindness being seen as punishment for sins of past lives, they make an ascent as much spiritual as geographical.

With them are American mountaineer Erik Weihenmayer, the first sightless person to scale Mount Everest, and Sabriye Tenberken, a blind German social worker who founded Braille Beyond Borders, after traveling alone across China to do so. Walker — who not only made the film but had to make the trip to do it — captures all the internal conflicts of the team: the gung-ho American shoot-for-the-top attitude vs. Tenberken’s belief that the climb itself is what’s important.

Some of the tone is uneven. When Weihenmayer is narrating, for instance, he sounds like an NBC Olympics broadcaster, with all the strangled spontaneity that implies. But the kids, in their courage and their conflicts — about their own worth and the westernized attitudes they’re exposed to — are inspiring.

Walker, whose previous film, “The Devil’s Playground,” examined Amish teens immersed in the modern world, has a delicate sense of observation that never seems confused, even in the thin air of the Himalayas. "Blindsight" is rated PG and is showing at the State Theatre.

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