Pema Tseden’s swan song about the fate of a snow leopard imprisoned by a vengeful farmer gains new layers of political meaning following the director’s death
ibetan film-maker Pema Tseden died of heart failure last year at the age of 53, just months after completing this movie; his health was almost certainly weakened by rough treatment from Chinese police inwhere he was prevented from retrieving his luggage, and the ensuing row escalated when police officers became involved and Tseden ended up in hospital.
A TV crew is seen making its way in a four-wheel drive across the vast Tibetan plateau to where a monk has told them a furious farmer is keeping a snow leopard – a nationally protected animal – illegally penned up, and intending to kill it in revenge for killing nine of his lambs.
The leopard is shown with digital effects which are a little obvious; there would perhaps have been an argument for not showing the leopard on screen at all.
While everyone waits for the police to arrive, the snow leopard has to be imprisoned in the same pen as the dead lambs and the surviving sheep, the vigilant farmer shouting and prodding the leopard to make sure it doesn’t kill anything else. And when the officers arrive, the confrontation turns into painful, angry, upsetting chaos, with Tseden clearly showing us what it means to challenge uniformed authority.
Tseden was not an overtly political film-maker and this is not an overtly political film; nor was the incident that might well have led ultimately to his death an overtly political incident. And yet the political implications of power are everywhere; the meanings are transformed and displaced into these characters and incidents. It’s a strange, sad swan song for this director.
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