Australian filmmaker Jennifer Peedom was shooting a documentary on Mount Everest when an avalanche killed 16 Sherpas last year.
"It was horrific," she says. "It was scary. It was sad."
But the tragedy also focused the story that Peedom went to the world's highest mountain to tell.
"We went to Everest to make a film about the disproportionate risks that Sherpas take in taking foreigners to the summit of Everest. Then right in front of us, this horrific thing happened which really highlighted how disproportionate those risks were."
Peedom's documentary Sherpa, which shows the fall-out from the tragedy that included simmering tensions between Sherpas and climbers, has been selected to screen in competition at Sydney Film Festival next month.
It will screen as Nepal recovers from the devastating earthquake on April 25 that has killed more than 7300 people. Eighteen died in an avalanche on Everest, with further avalanches leading to the cancellation of climbing season for the second consecutive year.
"It's been shocking to see the news," Peedom says. "This time it happened at base camp, not up on the mountain, so there were foreigners involved as well."
While the two tragedies highlight how dangerous it is scale Everest, Peedom has no doubt that climbers will return next year.
"There's a disaster mystique attached to it," she says. "History has shown that every time there's a disaster on Everest, the numbers increase the following year.
"I think that has something to do with the media and the fact that people sitting at home on their couches see that 'oh, just ordinary people like me can go and climb Everest'.
"You get attached to the romance of that idea. There's a lot of history and romance in the stories around Everest and it seems to be a magnet for whatever reason."
While the Sherpas have had a reputation for gentleness and quiet heroism since Tenzing Norgay reached the summit with Edmund Hillary in 1953, they have become increasingly politicised, which led to a violent clash with a climber two years ago.
"For many years now they've been watching foreigners take all the glory," Peedom says. "They've ended up on the cutting room floor of so many Everest films ...
"They grin and bear it because they don't really have a choice. This is what they're good at doing and they stand to earn quite a lot of money in proportion with what the rest of Nepalese society earns but everyone's got their limits.
"Like any culture of people that are moving towards self-determination, they're starting to say 'we're as good as you, why should we be treated like this?'."
Peedom, who was high altitude director on the 2006 documentary series Everest: Beyond The Limit and directed the 2007 documentary Miracle On Everest, believes there will be more tensions when climbing resumes.
"It all comes down to Sherpas being better educated and that's come as a result of their success in the Everest industry and the work of foreigners in setting up schools," she says. "Once a community gets educated and they start to travel and they start to see the differences and they start to perceive injustice, it's going to be an ongoing dynamic."
Sherpa will have its world premiere as one of 12 films in the competition for "courageous, audacious and cutting edge" cinema. The full program for the festival, which runs from June 3 to 14, will be announced on Wednesday.
