Join us for an evening that explores a common feature of Austria and Kosovo: Mountains!

18:00 Opening Remarks
18:30 Screening of the documentary “First on Everest” (eng/alb. subtitles) by Austrian film maker Gerald Salmina, which follows an expedition investigating one of the first attempts to reach the top of Mount Everest almost a century ago.
20:00 The screening is followed by a small cocktail.

Want to know more about the movie?

First on Everest
(Documentary, 2010, 99 Minutes)
A film by Gerald Salmina

In 1999 the German geologist Jochen Hemmleb makes his first sensational discovery, which makes him world-famous overnight. His team discovers, at a height of 8300 metres, just below the summit of Mount Everest, the corpse of possibly the first man to conquer the mountain – Englishman George Mallory.
Mallory is a legend. In 1924 he and his partner Andrew Irvine start their dramatic attempt to reach the summit at Everest. They never return. Since then, the greatest mystery of alpine history surrounds Mallory. Could it be that the strong-willed mountaineer was the first human to succeed in conquering the world’s highest peak – a quarter of a century before the New Zealander succeeded in doing so, who officially holds the record.
In 2010 Jochen Hemmleb starts a second time to try and find perhaps the last bit of evidence that George Mallory and Andrew Irvine were the first to conquer Mount Everest. Together with a team of Austrian mountaineers made up of Theo Fritsche, Axel Naglich, Volker Holzner and Sepp Bachmaier, as well as cameraman Günther Göberl and director Gerald Salmina, a new adventurous search begins in the snowfields of Mount Everest. The corpse of Andrew Irvine is still missing and with it the camera which both had taken to the summit…
During the expedition a 150-metres high tower of glacial ice collapses and while the huge avalanche of ice just barely misses the Austrian team, it kills one mountaineer of the Hungarian team. Although the Austrian team is immediately at the scene, it cannot save the Hungarian mountaineer because of the inaccessibility of the terrain and the persisting danger of a new avalanche. The situation is hopeless – only the harsh fact remains that death must be reckoned with at any time on Mount Everest.
During the long ascent the weather situation worsens again, and in addition to the increasingly unfavourable development, circulatory problems and a defective oxygen apparatus make the search ever harder. The very utmost is demanded from every member of the exhibition. Will David Irvine remain missing? Will the mountain ever reveal its secret?