Snow Leopard

Pema Tseden was a Tibetan writer and filmmaker, the first one in China to make films entirely shot in Tibetan. His rare talent, quiet yet immense, was that of an artist capable of interpreting with lucid precision the culture of his ethnic minority and of describing their sometimes difficult relationship with the bureaucracy and the laws of a central government, physically and spiritually very distant from his native Qinghai.

Using the past tense when writing about Pema doesn't feel right. It’s a painful reminder of the sudden death that caught him in the prime of his artistic maturity last May, when so many more important movies were waiting for him to shoot them. Snow Leopard was completed at the end of April, just a couple of weeks before his passing.

This beautiful tale of a majestic but deadly snow leopard and its complicated relationship with the communities of the Tibetan plateau is told through the eyes of a local television crew director and his former schoolmate, a monk passionate about photography. While the monk's brother, a herder who has suffered the loss of nine rams mauled by the leopard, wants to kill the beast, the religious man, who seems to subliminally communicate with the animal, wants to save it at all costs — and so do the local policemen.

Snow Leopard is a magical, memorable, visually stunning film. It’s yet another exquisite drama by Pema and an empathic portrait of the modern dynamics affecting the pastoral society of Tibet.

TIFF will forever miss Pema.

GIOVANNA FULVI

Official Selection, 2023 Toronto International Film Festival