Joe Simpson, whose battle for survival featured in Touching the Void, travels to the Eiger to tell the story of one of mountaineering’s most epic tragedies. Toni Kurtz was a brilliant mountaineer who in 1936 tried to be the first to conquer the Eiger. The Beckoning Silence recounts Kurtz’s heroic battle for survival but it also forces Simpson to confront some fundamental questions of his own. Why continue climbing when you have come so close to oblivion? Kurtz’s assault on the mountain started well, but then one by one his colleagues were killed leaving him alone, hanging on the end of a rope fighting for his life in the most horrific circumstances.
Mountaineer Joe Simpson’s bone-shattered crawl back to life after an accident cast him into a deep chasm in the Andes. Here, Louise Osmond films Simpson’s pragmatic but poetic memoir on how his lust for climbing came about; the six-year-old all agape as his father recounted the trials and terrors of a group of climbers scaling the then-untouched north face of the Eiger. Weaved into the sensitively dramatised footage, Simpson narrates how his own accident and recent memories of the horrors suffered by climbers have cooled his passion for the peaks, revealing a harrowing, humane story.