Meru [Blu-ray]
DVD Wholesale Quick Overview:
In the high-stakes pursuit of big-wall climbing, the Shark’s Fin on Mount Meru may be the ultimate prize. Sitting 21,000 feet above the sacred Ganges River in Northern India, the mountain’s perversely stacked obstacles make it both a nightmare and an irresistible calling for some of the world’s toughest climbers. In October 2008, renowned alpinists Conrad Anker, Jimmy Chin and Renan Ozturk arrived in India to tackle Meru. Their planned seven-day trip quickly declined into a 20-day odyssey in sub-zero temperatures with depleting food rations. Despite making it to within 100 meters of the elusive summit, their journey, like everyone before them, was not a successful one. Heartbroken and defeated, the trio returned to their everyday lives, where the siren song of Meru continued to beckon. By September 2011, Anker had convinced his two lifelong friends to undertake the Shark’s Fin once more, under even more extraordinary circumstances than their first attempt. MERU is the story of that journey, an expedition through nature’s harshest elements and one’s complicated inner demons, and ultimately on to impossible new heights.
A high-tech, high-octane, high-fiving addition to the venerable “mountain film” sub-genre, Meru is an engaging and cumulatively exhilarating debut from wife-and-husband team Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin. Chronicling the highly personable Chin’s agonizing attempts to scale one of the world’s cruelest summits — along with fellow elite-level daredevils Conrad Anker and Renan Ozturk — this gleamingly slick affair successfully caters both to extreme-sports devotees and also those who don’t know their crampons from their pitons.
Winner of the documentary Audience Award at Sundance in January, the U.S.-India co-production has proven a predictably popular pick at nonfiction and general festivals in the interim. A winning combination of the gruelingly practical and the luminously cosmic, it’s set for an international bow at Sheffield’s Doc/Fest in June ahead of an Oscar-qualifying stateside theatrical run in August via distributor Music Box. Tube exposure will follow courtesy of Showtime, but such vertiginously spectacular Himalayan vistas obviously demand to be displayed on the biggest possible screens.
Indeed, seldom can any film come so close to transporting viewers to the roof of the world — here thanks to the lightweight digital cameras wielded by Chin and his compadres during their two assaults on the daunting-but-enticing Shark’s Fin. Rearing some 20,700 feet above sea level, this jagged scream of snow-dappled stone was first attempted by Anker back in 2003. He returned in 2008 with Chin and Ozturk, but heavy storms delayed their progress, depleted their rations and forced the intrepid trio to reluctantly turn back within summit-sight.
DVD Wholesale Main Features
Language: English (Dolby Digital 5.1)
Subtitles: Castilian, Arabic, Bulgarian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Swedish, Turkish, Romanian
Subtitles for the Hearing Impaired: English
Region: Region 2
Aspect Ratio: 1.78:1
Number of discs: 1
Rated: G-General Audience
Studio: Universal Pictures
ASIN: B01B95BHJW
