Pema Tseden

Tibet and Tibetans have always been my theme. All my actors are Tibetan. I shoot on location in Tibet. All the dialogues are in Tibetan. My films reflect Tibetan ways of thinking. We’ve been trying to find our own film language.

― Pema Tseden, 2010

Tibetan director Pema Tseden (1969–2023) became, during his all-too-short life, one of the most remarkable filmmakers of this century. He revolutionized the representation of Tibet and Tibetans and shared his visions of authentic Tibetan life with the entire film-going world by reimagining how narrative cinematic fiction could operate within so-called “Chinese minority cinema”. His alternative formal strategies and narrative framings were inspired by the contemporary lived experience of Tibetans, centering in his works their culture, language, religion, and ways of inhabiting and interpreting their world.

Pema Tseden died mid-career, at the age of 53. Born to farmer-herder parents in the Tibetan highlands of Qinghai Province, China, he went to rural schools and trained as a teacher. After studying Tibetan literature at Northwest Minorities University, he discovered a passion for making films. A scholarship enabled him to enroll in the prestigious Beijing Film Academy (BFA), where he studied screenwriting and film directing. He was the first Tibetan to graduate from the BFA in 2004. Since 1991, he has published short stories in both Chinese and Tibetan that use humour and a seemingly simple yet eloquent style to depict aspects of contemporary Tibetan life.

While at the BFA, Pema Tseden shot two short films. After he graduated, he became the first Tibetan filmmaker working in China to shoot a feature film entirely in Tibetan: The Silent Holy Stones (2005).

It is fascinating to examine just how Pema Tseden sustained and elaborated his mission while working in a complicated context, as a Tibetan director creating his films inside China.

He shot seven more feature films, working largely with the same group of collaborators from Amdo (the Tibetan minority region near Xining and Qinghai Lake where he lived). This new generation of filmmakers he trained are now the nucleus of a “Tibetan New Wave” and continue his legacy today: they include Sonthar Gyal, Dukar Tserang, Lhapal Gyal, Dargye Tenzin, and Pema Tseden’s son Jigme Trinley.

Pema Tseden began in an artful realist style, employing carefully framed, exquisitely timed long takes and non-professional actors (The Search in 2009, Old Dog in 2010). These films explore the lives of rural Tibetans living in the People’s Republic of China in the early 21st century: the pressures they face as contemporary ways of life seep into traditional farming and monastic lifestyles; the challenges urban culture’s encroaching media attractions pose to traditional Tibetan opera and story-telling; the always-present status of Tibetan minority culture in a Han Chinese dominated country. This topic, though, is prudently built into the films ’deep structures and backgrounds.

A key source of early inspiration for Pema Tseden’s film style and practice was the films of Abbas Kiarostami:

At the Beijing Film Academy, I happened to come across some Iranian films […]. Although Tibet and Iran have different religions and cultures, the landscapes and human conditions have similarities. Iranian cinema also faces censorship. There are many topics they cannot film […] That inspired me a great deal as well. In Tibet, there are many rich stories to tell, there are many topics. But under the current circumstances, we are extremely limited in terms of what topics we can film. So I have focused on contemporary life in Tibet.

― Pema Tseden

One particularly Kiarostamian feature of Pema Tseden’s cinema is the road movie. His films spend a lot of time on the road: his characters are often in motion through Tibetan landscapes by road, across plateaus and grasslands, by motorcycle, and by car. Motion through landscape becomes one of the key tropes and generators of meaning in his films. Tibetan landscapes here are free of that romanticized, exoticized function as a consumable spectacle that they have in most Western and Chinese films set in Tibet. Pema Tseden’s cinematic landscapes are real, varied, contested spaces, sometimes run-down, sometimes fence-infested, with highways laid through the landscape as open-ended pathways for emotionally complex personal trajectories.

In Pema Tseden’s later films (Tharlo in 2015, Jinpa in 2018, Balloon in 2019, and Snow Leopard in 2023), his style began to change, as he experimented with a visionary, occasionally hallucinatory style that led audiences towards the more fabulous, fantastical, spiritual dimensions of Tibetans’ experiences.

The openness of Pema Tseden’s stories; his careful constructions of multiple, non-definitive points of view; his willingness to under-explain rather than over-explain his character’s complicated emotional trajectories: all of these open up his cinema to different audiences and complementary readings. This may help explain his unprecedented ability to create, as no one had before, an audience of Tibetan, Chinese, and Western viewers.

Given Pema Tseden’s position as a Tibetan in China, and the necessity of having his films pass Chinese censorship, his ability to tell these kinds of stories honestly, naturally, and eloquently, is masterful. That he managed to do so in films of such quiet, rhapsodic beauty is nothing short of astonishing.

— Shelly Kracier, curator

This retrospective is part of Compassionate Light: Stories of Tibet by Pema Tseden. This retrospective of the works of Pema Tseden has previously screened in 2024 at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York and this year at TIFF Cinematheque in Toronto.