Une femme qui part is Ellen Vermeulen’s latest documentary in which she studies the remarkable Marie-Louise Chapelle, the first French woman to reach an unclimbed peak in the Himalayas in 1952. She led a double life, being a mother for six months of the year and braving the other six untrodden mountains. Seventy years later, filmmaker Vermeulen is repeating this arduous climb.

Driven by Chapelle’s archive of diaries, letters and footage, Vermeulen traverses with her camera the inhospitable snow landscapes that have been changed beyond recognition by time and climate. She interweaves footage she shot herself with Chapelle’s archive material and reflects on her own life questions: a life with children, or without?

Une femme qui part explores the tension between personal ambitions and social inequality and exposes the limitations women are often condemned to. An intimate search for meaning, in which time, memories and choices become deeply intertwined. A film about limits, desires and the complexity of being a woman.