This inspirational documentary from American Lucy Walker is about a posse of blind Tibetan children who go on a climbing expedition up the north face of Mount Everest. They are led by Erik Weihenmayer, a blind mountaineer who successfully climbed the mountain, and Sabriye Tenberkin, an educator who is also blind. There were, however, sighted guides and the children were carefully monitored throughout.

The crux of Blindsight is not whether they succeed in reaching the top but what the children, some of them pre-teen girls, had to face in the hostile world down below.

Believed to be possessed by demons, punishing them for former sinful lives, the children have been rejected by both their families and society. One of the eldest was farmed out by his parents to a Chinese family as a beggar before running away and becoming a street urchin.

Walker shows, without too much dramatic emphasis, how the children react to both the perils of the mountain and those trying to save and educate them, growing in confidence as they prove able to make an ascent in conditions which would make most of us quail.

You wouldn’t believe it as fiction but it really is fairly unadorned fact. It is easy to see awards beckoning, and deservedly so because Walker as a film-maker never puts herself in front of her extraordinary subjects.