La metà della gloria

Year: 1996 Duration: 45 minutes At the beginning of the 1950s the conquest of the mythical third pole of the Earth is the order of the day. Everest, 8848 metres, has already repelled seven British attempts from the north side between the two wars. The Chinese occupation of Tibet in 1950 closed this path: as a political reaction, Nepal timidly opened up to the Western world. To the general surprise, the first beneficiaries of access authorization from the southern side, in 1952, were not the English but the Swiss. The mission is entrusted to a group of mountaineers from Geneva. On May 27, the well-known mountaineer Raymond Lambert and the Sherpa Tenzing, 200 meters from the summit, had to give up. It was a defeat, but also the opening of a route to the South Col. When, the following year, the Englishman Edmund Hillary and the Sherpa Tenzing reached the summit following the "Genevan route", the first gesture of the expedition British is sending a telegram to the Swiss: "To you a good half of the glory". 40 years later, Genevan mountaineers recall the past with images of the expedition. In French, subtitles in Italian.