Guido Magnone's incredible adventure begins strangely on the banks of the Ourcq canal among a group of kids who dream of swimming. Guido, the solitary son of "rital", dives to get noticed, succeeds, takes a liking to it, breaks his first record, collects medals. At the same time, he draws, attends the Beaux-Arts, is accepted with open arms and befriends the sculptors César and Féraud. At the end of the war, during a health stay in Chamonix, it is love at first sight for the mountains, climbing. Guido's ascent is now dizzying. He stormed the west face of the Drus, then the Fitzroy and the Tour de Mustagh, summits reputed to be impossible. He rubs shoulders with the greatest, Lionel Terray, Maurice Herzog, and participates in the Makalu expedition, camera in hand, or those of Jannu and Chacraraju. Later, in his fifties, Guido hangs up the carabiners and participates in the foundation of the UCPA
Terray. This name sounds like a challenge and evokes deep respect in the memory of every mountaineer. For all, Lionel Terray remains forever the "Conqueror of the useless", the example of a generous and mature mountaineer, far from any egocentrism and any ambition. Not only a pioneer and witness to the history of mountaineering, Terray is also remembered as a man and a master more than an athlete. Forty years after the tragic death of this extraordinary mountaineer and guide, who liked to think of himself as a "simple mountaineer", his former friends and the youngest generation of mountaineers come together in this film to celebrate and remember his legacy.
The American mountaineer Gary Hemming marked the era of the 1960s. The story of this "exceptional" character is intimately linked to that of the rescue of the two German mountaineers on the west face of the Drus, in 1966, a rescue which he had took the initiative. While the official emergency services of the EHM try to reach them from above, a pirate rope made up of Gary Hemming, René Desmaison, Lothar Mauch, Gil Bodin, Mike Brurke, François Guillot, the filmmaker Gérard Bauer organizes to join them from below and succeeded after a fierce struggle the rescue. The press seizes the event and elevates Gary Hemming to the rank of national hero. All the newspapers feature this big guy with a cool attitude, mismatched clothes, jovial smile and long blond hair on the front page. From then on, he was nicknamed: "the beatnik of the peaks".
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