Every peak above eight thousand metres had been climbed in winter except one. K2, the steep pyramid on the Pakistan side of the Karakoram, was the last first left in mountaineering, and a small team built around an Icelander, John Snorri Sigurjónsson, and a Pakistani father and son, Ali and Sajid Sadpara, set up at its foot to take it. The Last First: Winter K2, Amir Bar-Lev’s documentary for Apple TV, follows that plan from a quiet base camp to the moment it stopped being their climb and became everybody’s race.

The rivals arrived fast. A Nepali team built around Nirmal Purja, the former Gurkha and British special forces soldier, pitched tents beside them. Behind it came a commercial expedition run by Seven Summit Treks, with paying clients of very different experience, and influencer climbers who had brought their own camera operators. Bar-Lev told Deadline that the crowd “amplified the danger by an order of magnitude,” because the mountain was no longer the only threat: now there were dozens of people of uneven skill trying to do the same thing at the same time, against each other.

A race with no rulebook

What makes this a sports film rather than a survival film is a decision taken on the mountain. Snorri and the Sadparas believed they were climbing alongside the Nepali team, sharing the work on the route. In Bar-Lev’s account, Purja’s climbers meant to reach the summit first and claim it for Nepal, and did not tell the others. That is the hinge of the story, and the director refuses to hand the audience a villain. “There is a perspective in which one could see what the Nepalese did as treachery. And in fact, some people see it that way,” he said.

The other reading is about who has always carried the loads. Mountaineering runs on a gentleman’s code with no written rules, and yet it keeps score: records, rankings, firsts. For most of the sport’s history that code cast Nepali climbers, in Bar-Lev’s words, as “handmaidens to the glory of mostly white Western climbers.” They fixed the ropes, hauled the oxygen and broke trail; the names that went into the books were mostly European, American or Japanese. Seen from that side, a team that stopped announcing its plans and simply tried to win was treating mountaineering like the competition it had always pretended not to be.

Ten Nepali climbers reached the top of K2 in winter. Purja was the only one of them to do it without supplemental oxygen, the first person to manage that on K2 in the cold season. The last great first in the sport went to the people who had spent decades making other climbers’ firsts possible. Bar-Lev says that in two years of making the film he “flip-flopped a number of times” on who was in the right, and that his job was to let everybody put their best foot forward and let the audience decide.

Three men who kept climbing

The record fell, and the season kept going. Ali Sadpara was already a national figure in Pakistan, the climber who had made the first winter ascent of Nanga Parbat alongside Simone Moro and Alex Txikon, and he had not come to K2 to watch someone else’s flag. With Snorri, his son Sajid and the Chilean climber Juan Pablo Mohr, he went back up for a later summit push.

Sajid, twenty-one at the time, turned around when his oxygen regulator failed. His father, Snorri and Mohr never came down. Their bodies were found the following summer above the highest camp, near the section of the route known as the Bottleneck. They were not the season’s only dead. The Spanish climber Sergi Mingote fell on the descent on the same day the Nepali team reached the summit, and the Bulgarian Atanas Skatov fell on his way down from a higher camp. The film’s synopsis does the arithmetic in one line: by the time the base camp emptied, one team had made history, and five climbers were dead.

Pressure did not only come from the other tents. The Wire’s review describes the film tracing how Pakistan’s military leaned on the Sadparas to continue alongside Snorri for the sake of national pride, while Purja wanted Nepal’s flag on top. Two countries, two sets of expectations, one narrow route.

Who appears in the documentary

Apple’s press material centres the film on Snorri and the two Sadparas. Reviews out of the Sundance Film Festival say Bar-Lev also interviewed Purja and gave time to Elia Saikaly, a filmmaker who was on the mountain that winter, and that the Seven Summit group included the endurance athlete Colin O’Brady. Sajid Sadpara, who survived and later joined the search for his father, attended the premiere in Park City. Dawn reported that he spoke to the audience about the strategy on the mountain and the moment his father and Snorri went missing.

The footage is part of the story in its own right. A.V. Club’s critic noted that nearly everyone on K2 that winter carried a GoPro or a phone, and that several parties had hired their own camera crews. A race chased partly for followers left behind an unusual archive of evidence. Bar-Lev treats that as part of his subject: speaking to Deadline, he said the story is about “self-regard and this moment in time when everything is filmed.”

Why winter K2 was the last first

By January 2005, every one of the fourteen peaks above eight thousand metres had been climbed in winter except K2. The mountain is steeper and more technical than Everest, and Bar-Lev explained why the season makes it worse: it sits in the path of a jet stream, the weather turns quickly, and the wind strips away the snow that holds loose rock in place. On a face that sends everything straight down, he said, climbing becomes “almost like being caught in a crossfire.”

The pandemic supplied the final push. With lockdowns grounding climbers elsewhere, Pakistan had just reopened, and people with an empty calendar went where the last prize was. In A.V. Club’s phrase, a two-tent base camp became a small city, and a private attempt turned into a contest with sponsors, paying clients and an audience following online.

Bar-Lev knows this kind of terrain, even if he has never filmed at this altitude. The Tillman Story took apart the official version of how the NFL player Pat Tillman died in Afghanistan, and Happy Valley went inside Penn State during the Jerry Sandusky scandal. Both films built themselves around accounts that could not all be true at once. The Last First: Winter K2 puts a summit in that position. The director has said he was working with “essentially a dozen different perspectives,” some of them directly opposed.

It also lands in a genre that has lately preferred the hero portrait. Purja’s own record run across the fourteen highest peaks became the Netflix film 14 Peaks: Nothing Is Impossible, a story told largely from inside his team. Here he is one competitor among several, in a race where the finish line did not end the danger.

The first winter ascent of K2 belongs to ten Nepali climbers, and nothing in this documentary changes that entry in the record book. What Bar-Lev sets beside it is the rest of the ledger: a summit reached by a team that played to win, a father and son carrying a country’s expectations, clients who paid to stand near history, and cameras everywhere. Whether anyone who was on that mountain can own the summit without also owning the season is the question he leaves open.

Where and when to watch The Last First: Winter K2

The Last First: Winter K2 premieres globally on Apple TV on October 2, 2026, and also opens in select US theatres. The documentary runs 97 minutes. It had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2026, screened at Sheffield DocFest in June, and was acquired by Apple Original Films. Amir Bar-Lev directs; Howard T. Owens and Ben Silverman produce for Propagate Content, Sean Richard for Object Studios, and Sarah Thomson and John Battsek for Ventureland.

The Last First: Winter K2: quick answers

Is The Last First: Winter K2 a true story? Yes. It is a documentary about the real winter season of 2020 and 2021 on K2, built on interviews and footage shot by the climbers and crews who were there.

Who made the first winter ascent of K2? A team of ten Nepali climbers, including Nirmal Purja, on January 16, 2021.

What happened to Ali Sadpara? He went missing with John Snorri and Juan Pablo Mohr during a summit push on February 5, 2021. Their bodies were found in July 2021.

Where can I watch it? On Apple TV from October 2, 2026, and in select US theatres.