In one of the most poignant scenes in the award-winning documentary “Light of the Himalaya,” a woman with cataracts in both eyes looks forward excitedly to the prospect of having her sight restored, only to fall disconsolate when surgery on the first eye reveals another, more problematic cause for its blindness.
As luck would have it, however, her other eye turns out to be afflicted only with a cataract, which is readily removed, giving the woman not only her vision back, but healing her spirit as well.
“It was really wonderful what happened there,” says Michael Brown, a Boulder-based filmmaker. “This is probably the most dramatic surgery you could ever do, because of its emotional impact. When you first see these people, they’re pretty depressed and closed in. After the surgery, it’s amazing to see their personality re-emerge. It’s not just that they can see again, but they’re smiling, dancing and full of joy.”
“Light of the Himalaya,” scheduled for two benefit showings in Golden and Aspen next week, has won eight awards in film festivals so far this year, including best documentary at Breckenridge and best film on mountain culture at Taos. It also took the grand prize at an international festival of mountain films in Slovakia.
Offering up an unusual mixture of medicine and mountaineering, the 75-minute work chronicles a 2005 expedition in which several world-class climbers helped doctors with the Himalayan Cataract Project restore the eyesight of 425 people in two remote villages in Nepal – then embarked on a successful ascent of Cholatse, a 23,000-foot peak in the heart of the Khumbu region, just 6 air miles from Mount Everest.
“It was harder than Everest in terms of technical difficulty,” says Brown, a veteran adventurer who filmed the climb with a 25-pound high-definition camera, the same type he used in recording the 2001 ascent of Everest by the blind Colorado climber Erik Weihenmayer.
“I also carried the camera myself this time,” he adds, “whereas on Everest, I had Sherpa support.”
Brown concedes that “there’s a certain irony” in using a high-definition camera to tell stories about blindness.
“But it’s also really beautiful,” he says. “To me, what makes a good story is someone overcoming something. In ‘Everest: Farther Than the Eye Can See,’ it was Erik’s own fears and the doubts of his team. In ‘Light of the Himalaya’ it is the patients’ fear of needles. … In their entire lives, they may not receive more than $5 worth of medical care.”
The Himalayan Cataract Project, now in its 12th year, cures thousands of cases of cataract blindness each year at a cost of less than $20 per procedure, compared with $3,000 in this country.
It is the brainchild of Dr. Geoff Tabin, a Harvard-trained ophthalmalogist and mountaineer who first went to Nepal on a climbing trip in the early 1980s.
“I was thinking of going into sports medicine when I got out of medical school, and I actually came to the University of Colorado intending to become an orthopedic surgeon,” says Tabin, now a professor at the University of Utah.
“Then I went to Nepal and found the biggest problems were in public health – including cataracts, which cause 65 to 70 percent of all the blindness in Asia.”
Today he and his Nepalese partner, Dr. Sanduk Ruit, operate a network of 12 eye-care centers in rural areas of the country and are raising funds to finish a new wing at an eye-care hospital in Kathmandu, the capital.
“It’s uplifting,” Tabin says, in reference to both his work and the movie. “In a world where we hear about bad things everyday, this is an incredible success story that shows there really are some good things happening.”
For more on the Himalayan Cataract Project, go online to cureblindness.org.
Staff writer Jack Cox can be reached at 303-954-1785 or jcox@denverpost.com.
“Light of the Himalaya”
NOT RATED|1 hour, 15 minutes |DOCUMENTARY|Directed by Michael Brown; benefit screenings at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday at the American Mountaineering Center, 710 10th St., Golden; 7:30 p.m. Friday at Wheeler Opera House, 320 E. Hyman Ave., Aspen; each show will be preceded by a reception at 6:30 p.m.|$12|In Golden through the Colorado Mountain Club at 303-279-3080 or cmc.org/himalaya, and in Aspen through Wheeler Opera House at 970-920-5770 or wheeleroperahouse.com
