The photographer and film-maker Timothy Allen (winner in 2013 of the Travel Photographer of the Year competition) has been making regular trips in recent years to Mongolia, where he runs photographic expeditions. He is due to release shortly his latest film, made with Thom Cytry. The Circle, which will be free to watch on YouTube, tells how the pair of them, helped by a group of Mongolian friends, tried to carve out a virgin route across the Altai Mountains to climb Mongolia’s tallest peak.
Film Archive
Up a mountain in Mongolia
Headphones on, and off to the Amazon
Fancy lighting out for the Amazon? You won’t need to go near an airport, never mind wear a mask. All you’ll need is a connection to YouTube and a pair of headphones. Simon McBurney’s one-man show The Encounter, which I saw at the Barbican in London in 2016, is online until May 22. I worried it would be a huge disappointment after the stage version, but I dipped in for 45 minutes and it’s astoundingly good even on a desktop in daytime. I’d forgotten how funny the preamble was, and there’s a haircut joke that now seems made for our locked-down times. I’m going to watch the whole thing again on a big screen, in a darkened room, this evening.
‘Shepherdess of the Glaciers’
Thanks to Village Ways (with which I’ve headed into the hills in India and Ethiopia) for pointing me on Twitter towards a trailer for Shepherdess of the Glaciers, a documentary telling the story of Tsering, one of the last shepherdesses in Ladakh. You can read more about her and the making of the film on the website Feminism in India. The writer Rose George, another lover of the hills (who pounds up them a bit faster than I do), was equally taken with the film. As she put it on her own Twitter feed: “And us fell runners think we’re hard. This woman and her life are transfixing.”