El desafío del K2

Sinopsis

The K2 or Chogori, as it is called by those who live near the Karakorum mountain range, is much more than the second highest mountain in the world. It is THE MOUNTAIN. In 1986 the shadow of a curse hovered over this beautiful mountain. In that fateful year, a great number of mountaineers lost their lives in the various expeditions which tried to reach the summit, one of the most dramatic of which was the one survived by Kurt Diemberger, who became a living legend of the K2.

From then up to the present, tragedies and glorious moments have followed each other on its steep slopes. Its “curse” seems to hold a special appeal, which causes that each time the summit is reached it is celebrated as if it were the first. Juanjo Sansebastian, who made it to the top and lost one of his best friends, the experienced mountaineer Atxo Apellaniz, defines the K2 “as the only eight-thousand-metre peak  he knows from whose base camp one can see the summit. His words reveal the degree of difficulty and danger of the climb: “one does not stop climbing from the first metre to the last”. In 1997 four experienced Basque mountaineers, Jose Ramón Aguirre (Marron), Juan Vallejo, Alberto Zerain and Mikel Saez, who made up the Años Luz expedition to the K2, felt its call and decided to try the climb. That attempt, once more, nearly ended in tragedy.

El desafio del K2 narrates the project, the preparations, the dramatic climb and the outcome of that expedition. It also tries to explain why the human being risks his life for those short moments he spends on top of a mountain.

Technical information

• Director: Iñaki Arteta
• Genre: Documentary
• Length: 56' programme
• Production: K 2000 and Años Luz