Snow Leopard: beauty and brutality intertwine in Pema Tseden’s final feature

When Pema Tseden died suddenly in May 2023, at the age of 53, he left behind a small but crucial body of work that remains too little seen in the west. As one of the few Tibetan-born directors in China making government-approved films about Tibetan culture, he was a unique figure even at home. He was the first Tibetan graduate of the Beijing Film Academy, and his landmark debut The Silent Holy Stones (2005) was the first Chinese feature shot entirely in the Tibetan language.

Snow Leopard, Pema Tseden’s eighth and final feature, is among his most ambitious and beautiful works. Set in rural Qinghai province, about 500 kilometres from where he was born, the film opens with the arrival of a Chinese television crew looking to report on a situation involving an irate farmer named Jinpa (played by the mononymous actor of the same name – one of Pema Tseden’s most loyal collaborators) who has taken a snow leopard captive after it killed nine of his sheep. and is demanding compensation. Meanwhile, Jinpa’s brother, a Buddhist monk nicknamed Snow Leopard Monk because of his interest in photographing the region’s big cats, is having visions of freeing the beast.

Snow Leopard unfolds as a series of furious confrontations broken up by a number of mystical moments and intimate conversations, all of which Pema Tseden stages with a deft command of tone and atmosphere. Working with the Belgian cinematographer Matthias Delvaux, the director turns the remote farm and surrounding Himalayas into a matrix of differing languages, traditions, and belief systems. Jinpa’s grievance gives rise to questions related to each of these issues, but Pema Tseden wisely does not choose sides. Instead, as in the similarly knotty social dramas of Iran’s Asghar Farhadi or Romania’s Cristian Mungiu, he allows the arguments to play out in a way that means ethical lines are redrawn almost moment by moment.

“The snow leopard’s world is very cruel,” observes Jinpa’s father (Losang Choepel) when watching a video of the animal in the wild, to which the lead TV reporter (Genden Phuntsok) responds, “Actually, the human world is just the same.” While Pema Tseden’s films never retreated from cruelty – his great theme was the plight of China’s Tibetan minority – he managed something rarer in his work by casting even the most unfortunate aspects of the human condition in a kind of resplendent glow. Pitched somewhere between beauty and brutality, Snow Leopard is quintessential Pema Tseden: vivid, visceral, and illuminating.

► Snow Leopard is in UK cinemas 22 November.