This film is about Günter Oskar Dyhrenfurth and his son Norman Dyhrenfurth. Professor Günter Oskar Dyhrenfurth, alpinist and cinema pioneer, begins his career in the twenties. The film in the first part tells about the full and intense life of the professor: the teaching in Bresalu, the wedding with his beloved and jewish wife Hettie, the National Socialist events in Germany and his incredible expeditions on Himalaya.
Norman Dyhrenfurth, between 1952 and 1986, took part in seven big expeditions to the Himalayas, most of them as a guide and always as a cameraman and director. Dyhrenfurth migrated to the United States in 1937, when he was nineteen. That was the beginning of his successful career, first as a young cameraman, and later as a professor and dean of the University of California in Los Angeles. The key experience in his life was his participation as a cameraman in the Swiss expedition to Everest in 1952, which paved the way for the first British ascent the following year. Dyhrenfurth achieved the height of success as an expedition leader to the Himalayas in 1963, when with the American team he climbed Everest via a new route, the “Hornbein-Couloir”. The first filming of Mount Everest, apart from being screened around the world, had the honour of being shown at the White House for the US President J.F.Kennedy.