Broad Peak

Broad Peak (2022) is a Polish drama based on the life of climber Maciej Berbeka, and you can watch it online on iFILM. It centers on one of the eight-thousanders of the Karakoram and on a man who let a single unfinished summit shape the rest of his life.

Berbeka reached Broad Peak as a younger man, only to learn a painful fact afterward: he had stopped at a forepeak hundreds of meters short of the real top. The world counted it as a triumph. He counted it as a job left undone. A quarter-century later, no longer young, he goes back up — in winter, when the mountain takes the most lives. Ireneusz Czop plays him; Maja Ostaszewska is the wife who waits below.

Director Leszek Dawid isn't really making a sports film. He's filming what a person will trade for one more step toward a summit. The cold, the thin air, the labored breathing arrive without movie heroics. Worth a watch if mountain stories and the cost of stubbornness pull at you. Stream Broad Peak (2022) online on iFILM.