Snow Leopard review: Maul creatures big and small

When Pema Tseden died suddenly in May 2023 at the age of 53, she left behind a small but important body of work rarely seen in the west. As one of the few Tibetan-born directors to make government-sanctioned films about Tibetan culture in China, he was a unique figure even in his own country. He was the first Tibetan graduate of the Beijing Film Academy, and his groundbreaking debut film, The Silent Holy Stones (2005), was the first Chinese-language feature film shot entirely in Tibetan.

Pema Tseden’s eighth and final film, Snow Leopard, is among her most ambitious and beautiful works. Set in rural Qinghai province, some 500 kilometers from his hometown, the film opens with the arrival of a Chinese television crew looking to cover a situation involving an angry farmer named Jinpa (played by the actor of the same name). Pema (one of Tseden’s most loyal collaborators) captured a snow leopard after killing nine of its sheep. and demands compensation. Meanwhile, Jinpa’s brother, a Buddhist monk nicknamed the Snow Leopard Monk for his interest in photographing the area’s big cats, has dreams of freeing the beast.

Snow Leopard unfolds as a series of angry confrontations, punctuated by a series of mystical moments and intimate conversations, with Pema Tseden mastering tone and atmosphere. Working with Belgian cinematographer Matthias Delvaux, the director transforms the remote farm and the surrounding Himalayas into a matrix of different languages, traditions and belief systems. Jinpa’s complaint raises questions about each of these issues, but Pema Tseden wisely does not choose sides. Instead, as in similar thorny social dramas by Iran’s Asghar Farhadi or Romania’s Cristian Mungiu, he allows debates to progress in ways that amount to an almost moment-by-moment redrawing of ethical lines.

“The world of the snow leopard is so cruel,” says Jinpa’s father (Losang Choepel) while watching a video of the animal in the wild. TV the reporter (Genden Phuntsok) replies: “Actually, the human world is the same.” While Pema Tseden’s films never backed away from cruelty (their central theme was the plight of the Tibetan minority in China) she achieved something rarer in her work, reflecting even the most unfortunate aspects of the human condition with dazzling shine. Somewhere between beauty and brutality, Snow Leopard is Pema Tseden’s quintessence: vibrant, heartfelt and illuminating.

► Snow leopard inside England in cinemas November 22.