Mountain Man

In Bhutan, 11-year-old Yangchen’s father is the country’s glacier specialist, and thus the only person authorized to climb the mountains, which are considered to be sacred. He spends months away from home measuring the rapidly melting glaciers. While hiking through the snow to the farthest reaches of the Bhutanese Himalayas, he faithfully shoots videos for his daughter with his phone. These videos take the viewer into breathtaking landscapes, but it also becomes increasingly apparent that something irreversible is happening.

We follow Yangchen’s daily life at school and at home, where she prays at an altar that her father won’t disturb the snow lion, the mythical embodiment of the glacier—the Bhutanese believe that this could provoke disaster. But in reality, the biggest threat to the snow lion’s survival is not Yangchen’s father, but climate change.