Jurek

On 24 October 1989, Jerzy Kukuczka dies during the Lhotse expedition. It was the first time when he went to the Himalayas with money, equipment, and as a really famous person. The film doesn’t concentrate on the mystery of the mountaineer's death, but it shows a person who climbs up, higher and higher - literally, but also metaphorically and symbolically. From a bootblack to a millionaire, from a socialist worker to an international media star, from the man who climbs without any money and equipment to the real competitor of Reinhold Messner in the climb to the Crown of the Himalayas and the Karakoram. Interviews with family and friends, archives, photographs, recordings, excerpts from television programmes and interviews make up the portrait of Himalayan mountaineers in 1980s. It is also the image of the times in which they lived - hard and colourful at the same time, when idealism was valued more than fame.