Apple Lands Sundance Mountain Climbing Doc The Last First: Winter K2
Apple has acquired the global rights to The Last First: Winter K2, the mountaineering doc from Amir Bar-Lev that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. Propagate, Ventureland and Object Studios are behind the doc, which follows a 2021 expedition to conquer the “last great prize in mountaineering”, climbing Asia’s K2 mountain in winter, an attempt…
Apple has acquired the global rights to The Last First: Winter K2, the mountaineering doc from Amir Bar-Lev that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival.
Propagate, Ventureland and Object Studios are behind the doc, which follows a 2021 expedition to conquer the “last great prize in mountaineering”, climbing Asia’s K2 mountain in winter, an attempt that left five dead.
Bar-Lev centers his story on mountaineers John Snorri Sigurjónsson and Pakistani father-son team Ali and Sajid Sadpara, who set out to be the first to summit K2 in the winter, but find themselves on the ascent with influencer climbers and their film crews, commercial expedition clients, and Nims, a Nepalese celebrity mountaineer, and his team of Sherpas. The Last First tackles commercialization, the effects of social media and the presence of class and economic status in extreme mountaineering.
Sean Richard, Sarah Thomson, John Battsek, Howard T. Owens, and Ben Silverman produced the doc. Executive producers include Drew Buckley, James Packer, Will Kane, Amir Bar-Lev, Taylor Levin, Kerstin Emhoff and Ali Brown.
Apple is currently in the awards race with Come See Me In the Good Light, which was acquired last year out of the 2025 Sundance festival and has since been nominated for an Academy Award. Other previous Sundance doc pick-ups for the studio have been Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie and Boys State.
The deals out of the 2026 Sundance Film Festival have been slow going, with The Last First among only a handful of announced acquisitions. Others have included queer horror Leviticus landing at Neon and Olivia Wilde’s The Invite heading to A24.
Cinetic negotiated the deal on behalf of the filmmakers.
