Tragedies and triumphs make Jen Peedom’s career like no other

As the Sangria hit, the laughter of the lunchtime crowd at the Una Mas tapas bar reached a crescendo.

Filmmaker Jen Peedom looked anxiously at the iPhone recording in front of her, squished between platters of seafood and peppers. “Do you think you’ll be able to hear this?”

Jen Peedom’s childhood revolved around exercise for well-being.Credit: Edwina Pickles

The petite filmmaker is big on logistics and challenges; she’s the sort of woman who will climb towards the top of Mt Everest with a film camera strapped across her back. The sort of woman whose concession to avoiding risk post-motherhood was “promising myself and my husband that I wouldn’t go through the icefall. It was my first time on the south side of Everest; there isn’t one of the north side. An icefall is like a jumbly waterfall of ice that has cascaded down the hill very slowly. But it breaks up and some of the blocks of ice are as big as houses and they continually move and creak. It doesn’t matter how good a climber you are. Anything can happen. That was the deal-breaker for me.”

“Oh!” I squeak. My impending struggle in transcribing a recording made at a sunny table in the stylish Coogee Pavilion, hindered only by raucous Friday lunchers, pales in comparison.

Peedom has chosen Una Mas because it’s a favourite. Her home is up the hill and she walks her border collie, River, down to the beach most mornings. And she loves things Spanish, having started her adventurous life on a student exchange to a poor neighbourhood in Panama City (“I built a lot of resilience”) and then later living in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

We select our food speedily: sardines with pickled onions and raisins, patatas bravas, a special of small green peppers, spatchcock pollo with garlic toum and kashmiri chilli and the octopus with fermented habanero. But there is much deliberation about whether to brave a lunchtime glass of wine until our waiter convinces us that a glass each of the 2020 Artomana ‘Txarmant’ Txakolina Hondarrabi Zuri blend from the Basque region would go the perfectly with our food. And so it does.

A selection of tapas.Credit: Edwina Pickles

The filmmaker grew up in Canberra in an “outdoorsy and active” family. Her primary school teacher mother, Beth, and government lawyer father, Mike, were “into the idea of exercise for well-being. So on Sunday afternoons we would do the family run. I did my first 10km fun run when I was six years old. Through that I learnt what can be the enormous pleasure of pushing your body to the limits. The resilience that comes from knowing you can go a little bit harder. The persistence. That set me up for Everest.”

Peedom and her older siblings, Rachael and David, each played two musical instruments. “I was the least talented but I played the violin and the piano.” Her musical knowledge has proved handy on her latest project River , the second film she has made with Richard Tognetti’s Australian Chamber Orchestra, creating a documentary of exquisite images teamed with classical and original music interspersed with actor Willem Dafoe’s narration of an evocative script by UK writer Robert Macfarlane. River will premiere as soon as lockdowns allow with the ACO performing the soundtrack live to accompany the 75-minute film.

Jennifer Peedom (front) with her fellow contestants in Race Around Oz: Dahlia Abdel-Aziz, Keiman Fitzpatrick, Paul Klarenaar, Andrew Cillons and Stacey McCleary.Credit: ABC TV

Peedom’s arrival in the film world was accidental. She studied at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology — business, photography and travel writing — before “a weird set of circumstances” found her in commodity trading.

“This was not something that I have regretted doing because it developed negotiation skills and management skills. But I was a square peg in a round hole. Just having to wear a suit.....” Her voice tails off.

In 2000 she won a spot in the ABC-TV’s Race Around the World for fledgling documentary makers. “It immediately was so clear to me that this is what I wanted to do.”

Peedom reflects on the themes that recur in her work. “I am interested in people in fairly extreme circumstances... in human vulnerability. I am really interested in how far you can push yourself. I would often end up in fairly remote places and as the only woman.”

After placing third in the show, she “thought the phone would be ringing off the hook but, of course, that didn’t happen”. She applied for a job as a volunteer at Inside Film magazine. “By lunchtime I was the marketing manager and that role quickly became the general manager and then the managing director. It’s funny how ballsy you are when you are young!”

Spatchcock pollo, garlic toum, kashmiri chilli.Credit: Edwina Pickles

Peedom spent almost seven years at Inside Film working alongside other aspiring film-makers such as David Michod, who went on to direct Animal Kingdom, and while trying to kickstart her documentary career on the side. “I had really found my tribe. It was my film school and we were like a family, ” she says. We pause to savour our food. “This is so yummy,” she says.

In 2006-2007 Peedom worked with Michod on Solo,“the most traumatic film I have ever done”. Australian kayaker Andrew McAuley died just one day before completing a solo crossing to New Zealand. Peedom was sharing a hotel room with his wife Vicki and a bunk with their two-year-old when news came of the distress call. “Witnessing Vicki’s grief is something I will never forget. But I am glad I was able to be a support to her and she wasn’t on her own.”

Previously, in 2003, on a trek in Nepal, Peedom had discovered a potential niche. “I felt something very powerful there; it felt like I was coming home and my body seemed to handle the altitude really well. One of the camera operators said to me: ‘I think you may have the altitude gene.’ I went to New Zealand and learnt climbing so I wouldn’t be a liability to anyone. I am a small person! The Sherpas call me ‘the pocket rocket’. But I think my endurance came back to all those triathalons I did as a kid in Canberra. But I was never on a mountain without a camera. It was about the filming, not the climbing.”

Later, the filmmaker tells me: “I have experienced the transcendence when you push yourself through to the other side. I have thought about the siren song that causes certain people to risk their lives on something that can’t love them back.”

Jen Peedom at work on ‘Sherpa’.

In 2006 she was hired as a high-altitude director for the Discovery Channel documentary series Everest: Beyond The Limit. The previous year she had summited the sixth highest mountain in the world, Cho Oyu (8188m), “because it is important for people to know that your body can work at 8000 metres.” She had her “summit permit” for Everest and was at Camp Three (8200m) when she was told by the producers she couldn’t go higher than Camp Four (8400m) as it would cost an extra US$25,000 to insure her to the top.

“My job that day [at Camp Four] was to film the climbers leaving camp in the middle of the night and then, as they came back down from either the summit or failure, I was to interview them.”

There was a disaster that day that made international news. “The climbers had passed a British climber called David Sharp who had climbed inside a cave. They hadn’t seen him on the way up because it was completely dark and on the way down they saw him but he couldn’t be rescued. His legs were frozen, it was a real tragedy. The papers said they had climbed over a dying man to get to the summit... but when they got back to me, a lot of them were very emotional. The ethics at the top of the world. He died. I have seen the footage the Sherpas took as they tried to save him. They tried to get him up but ultimately he couldn’t get up. You need to get someone on their own two feet [to get them down].

‘The things you see; the egos. I was always more interested in the Sherpas. I had climbed with them and they knew I wasn’t a liability.’

“But I was pretty over that. The things you see; the egos. I was alway more interested in the Sherpas. I had climbed with them and they knew I wasn’t a liability. I wouldn’t do anything stupid. If you are a woman you do have to work harder, for sure, there is an element of trying to prove yourself.”

Peedom’s first big TV credit as a director came in 2008 with Miracle on Everest, an ABC/National Geographic Channel production which told the story of Australian mountaineer Lincoln Hall, who survived near-death close to the summit of Everest.

But tragedy hit again in 2014 when she returned to the Himalayas to film the BAFTA-nominated Sherpa. “Sixteen Sherpas ferrying loads between base camp and camp one were killed when a block of ice broke off. At the time this was the worst avalanche in Everest history, but it’s happening more and more with climate change. But I did think ‘why me? Why does this happen every time I make a movie?’ We went back to the [Sherpa] villages, which was completely essential to the film but it was just devastating. I remember sitting there thinking ‘is this the right thing to do?’”

High altitude: a scene from Peedom’s first collaboration with the ACO ‘Mountain’.Credit: Jennifer Peedom

Peedom had married photographer Mark Rogers in 2006 and they spent the last part of their honeymoon at Everest base camp both working on Everest: Beyond the Limit. (“He’d had no interest in climbing and had never worn crampons”). Juggling their careers after the birth of two children (daughter Tashi, now 12, and son Luca, 10) was a challenge. On the eve of applying for a role in the film bureaucracy, she discovered she was the first recipient of the $25,000 David and Joan Williams documentary fellowship. “That was a game changer. It was enough to keep me going.”

This aerial Green River confluence in Canyonlands National Park, Utah, is included in ‘River’.Credit: Peter McBride

The ACO film River is a companion to 2017’s Mountain, which became the highest-grossing homegrown documentary in Australian cinema. It combines images from 39 countries, supplied by 60 sources, with classical works by Bach, Vivaldi, Mahler, Ravel, Sibelius and Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead as well as original works by Richard Tognetti and Kalkadunga didgeridoo virtuoso William Barton (who also sings). The structure of Mountain and River are the same. “There is wonder, the sense of why. Then you need to introduce conflict. What is going wrong here? Then you show there is a way to find hope,” she says.

“It’s a complex process because classical music doesn’t necessarily do what you want it to do like a score does. The plan was always to do a live concert and you can’t just fade out...the ACO audience is very discerning. You have to let the music be front and centre. You need to know when to work with the rhythms and when to go against them.

“ Tognetti was determined to include a section of Bach’s Chaconne, which was tricky. But it was a match made in heaven. I have not watched the film once without getting goosebumps.” A third film is planned but its topic is still secret.

What has been announced is that Peedom is moving into drama, and back to the Sherpas as the director of a feature film on Tenzing Norgay, who was first to the summit of Everest with Sir Edmund Hillary in 1953. Tenzing is backed by Barack and Michelle Obama’s Higher Ground Productions.

As we order coffees, Peedom offers a handy summary of her work.

“In the end what I strive for is to give an audience an emotional experience; a way to think about the world.”

Dates for the ACO’s live performances of River will be announced shortly, subject to lockdown.The film will later be released more broadly.

Una Mas, 130a Beach St, Coogee, [phone]. Check opening hours due to COVID-19 restrictions.