When Pema Tseden died suddenly in May 2023 at the age of 53, he left behind a small but crucial work that remains 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 film shot entirely in Tibetan.

Snow Leopard, Pema Tseden’s eighth and final feature, is among his most ambitious and beautiful works. Set in rural Qinghai province, some 500 kilometers from where he was born, the film opens with the arrival of a Chinese television crew seeking to cover a situation involving an angry farmer named Jinpa (played by the eponymous actor with same name – one of Pema Tseden’s most loyal collaborators) who took a snow leopard into captivity after it killed nine of his sheep. and demand compensation. Meanwhile, Jinpa’s brother, a Buddhist monk nicknamed the Snow Leopard Monk because of his interest in photographing the region’s big cats, has visions of freeing the beast.

Snow Leopard unfolds as a series of furious confrontations punctuated by a series of mystical moments and intimate conversations, all of which Pema Tseden stages with skill in 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 discontent raises questions about each of these issues, but Pema Tseden does not choose his sides wisely. Instead, as in the equally knotty social dramas of Iran’s Asghar Farhadi or Romania’s Cristian Mungiu, he allows arguments to unfold in a way that means ethical lines are redrawn almost moment to moment.

“The world of the snow leopard is very cruel,” observes Jinpa’s father (Losang Choepel) as he watches a video of the animal in the wild, which he leads television the reporter (Genden Phuntsok) replies, “Actually, the human world is the same.” While Pema Tseden’s films have never shied away from cruelty – his big theme was the plight of China’s Tibetan minority – he has achieved something rarer in his work, throwing even the most unfortunate aspects of the human condition into a sort of glittering glow. Set somewhere between beauty and brutality, Snow Leopard is quintessential Pema Tseden: vivid, visceral and illuminating.

► The Snow Leopard is in United Kingdom cinemas November 22.