TIFF 2026: The team behind Tenzing climbs a different cliff of Mount Everest cinema

TIFF 2026: The team behind Tenzing climbs a different cliff of Mount Everest cinema BARRY HERTZ PUBLISHED 57 MINUTES AGO Open this photo in gallery: Tom Hiddleston, left, and Genden Phuntsok as the title character in Tenzing, the new docudrama chronicling the unbelievable life of Nepalese-Indian mountaineer Tenzing Norgay. APPLE TV/SUPPLIED COMMENTS SHARE SAVE FOR LATER Listen to this article Learn more about audio Log in or create a free account to listen to this article. If premiering the film that you’ve worked on for years might feel like scaling a cliff – the potential for impossibly high triumph, but also the danger of falling to your ruin – then at least director Jennifer Peedom knows what she’s getting into. Or climbing up. This week, the Australian filmmaker is heading to the Toronto International Film Festival with Tenzing, her new docudrama chronicling the unbelievable life of Nepalese-Indian mountaineer Tenzing Norgay, who alongside New Zealander Edmund Hillary in 1953 was first to summit Mount Everest. Tracing the title character’s life – from an impoverished childhood to becoming an indispensable member of John Hunt and Hillary’s expedition team – Peedom’s biopic both shines a light on a severely underexposed historical figure and asks thornier questions about why humanity continues to push itself to explore every corner of the world, sometimes with devastating consequences. Peedom is far from a rookie when it comes to standing amid the clouds, having previously made the acclaimed documentaries Sherpa and Mountain, which each explored the intoxicating mix of courage and death-defiance that one must possess to reach new heights. She has a personal connection with Everest, too. At TIFF, and in Washington, Quebec’s film industry finds itself in the hot seat “I first went to the Himalayas with a friend of mine who was a camera operator on Everest expeditions. We stayed with Sherpa families the whole way through, and that was my introduction to the region, through the Sherpa community,” Peedom says in an interview a few weeks ahead of her film’s TIFF debut. A few years after that initial visit, Peedom went back to shoot her first documentary, which focused on the north side of Everest. Made for a foreign-correspondent program back in Australia, the 20-minute doc looked at Everest from the Sherpa point of view, a perspective almost wholly ignored in films and books about the region. “That community was always more interesting to me…