It wasn't the darkness Erik Weihenmayer feared most as a 15-year-old going blind.

"I was afraid to be swept to the sidelines and forgotten. To be obsolete," he says in the movie "Blindsight," opening Friday at the Harris Theater, Downtown. Weihenmayer has been anything but.

In May 2001 at age 32, he became the first blind climber to reach the summit of Mount Everest. In "Blindsight," he and sighted guides join six blind Tibetan teenagers as they attempt to climb the 23,000-foot Lhakpa Ri on the north side of Everest.

"The worst outcome is that we all die in an avalanche or that someone falls into a crevasse," the mountaineer says of the expedition. Is that all?

An invitation from a pioneering blind educator named Sabriye Tenberken to visit and perhaps do a small climbing workshop with her students mushroomed into an adventure that would test the hardiest athletes, let alone blind youngsters who had been shunned or shamed.

---

'Blindsight'

3 stars = Good
Ratings explained

• Rating: PG for some thematic elements and mild language
• Web site: blindsightthemovie.com

---

Many Tibetans harbor notions about blindness that are as cruel as they are antiquated. Children, some of whom consider blindness karmic payback for "bad deeds in a past life," are called "blind idiots" and told it's better to be dead than sightless.

A mother says a serpent cursed her 17-year-old son and now, "The cleverest child has gone to waste. Without eyes, a man is not complete." Tashi, a gangly 19-year-old from a remote Chinese village, has what appear to be cigarette burns from the couple who "bought" him so he could beg for money.

This is the backdrop for the expedition, which director Lucy Walker and producer Sybil Robson-Orr chronicle with a crew that suffered such ailments as altitude sickness, food poisoning, flu and dysentery.

The movie weaves an abbreviated version of Weihenmayer's story with those of the climbers. It chronicles the dissent among the adults who, rightly and forcefully, ask if some students are too ill to continue or if reaching the summit is the point of the journey.

"Blindsight" was shot in two installments, in May 2004 when the crew documented a climb up a vertical rock face and trek over a 16,000-foot pass, and in fall 2004, when the filmmakers visited the students' homes and documented the expedition itself.

The timing is either not made clear or clear enough and a wrenching reunion between a teen and his family is captured (apparently as police tried to stop the filming) but oddly abbreviated, perhaps to spare the young man further distress, anger and embarrassment.

The filmmakers shot 250 hours of footage, had access to another 20 hours, and produced a documentary that runs 104 minutes. It could have used another five or 10 minutes to flesh out some aspects of the story or fully answer questions that hang in the air.

"Blindsight," which takes its name from a corrupted version of blindsided and from a medical phenomenon involving perceived vision, transports moviegoers to breathtaking physical and raw emotional places.

It's a testament to reaching for the sky, to teamwork and to overcoming seemingly insurmountable obstacles. The climb could be considered foolhardy, but the climbers simply fearless.