PEMA TSEDEN
1969 - 2023
Pema Tseden was born on 3 December 1969 to a family of nomadic herders in the Amdo region of Tibet. He initially trained as a Tibetan language teacher, working in a primary school in his native Amdo for four years. In 1991, he went on to study for an undergraduate degree at Northwest Minzu University in Lanzhou, majoring in Tibetan language and literature. He later returned there to study for his master’s degree in Tibetan-Mandarin translation.
Pema long held a fascination for storytelling, both through literature and cinema. As a writer, he had numerous works published in both Tibetan and Mandarin, including three anthologies of short stories. Many of his written works have been translated into other languages including English, French, German, Spanish, Czech, Japanese and Korean.
In 2002, having received a 2-year scholarship from US non-profit organisation Trace Foundation, Pema became the first ethnic Tibetan to attend the prestigious Beijing Film Academy where he studied directing and scriptwriting. His writing career continued in tandem with his work as a filmmaker, some of his written works forming the basis for adaptations into feature films as his filmmaking career progressed. He often drew inspiration from chance encounters and everyday moments as well as Tibetan art and culture – from a balloon floating adrift into a Beijing sky, to a love story he once heard from a businessman, as well as the aesthetics of thangka paintings and Tibetan opera.
In 2004, Pema Tseden made his first film, a 30-minute short film entitled Grassland, following which he completed his acclaimed debut feature The Silent Holy Stones, winning the New Currents Award at Busan International Film Festival among other awards. His other films include The Search (2009), Old Dog (2011), The Sacred Arrow (2014), Tharlo (2015), Jinpa (2018), Balloon (2019) and Snow Leopard (2023).
Pema was particularly influenced by Tibetan cultural traditions, oral literature and folk tales, depicting striking representations of a largely unknown Tibet to the wider world. His representations of contemporary Tibetan society draw on environment, landscape and Buddhism and spirituality. While his early films were infused with a strongly social realist aesthetic, his later films touch more heavily on magical realism, with often dreamlike sequences. Road trips feature strongly across his body of work, vehicles often serving as a confined space within which to dig deeper into his characters, set against sweeping vistas of the Tibetan Plateau.
Pema often employed non-professional actors, although well-known Tibetan cultural figures have frequently appeared in his films – poet and comedian Shide Nyima (Tharlo), singer Yangshik Tso (The Silent Holy Stones, Tharlo, Balloon) and Jinpa who features in several of Pema’s later films (Jinpa, Balloon, Snow Leopard). All of Pema’s films are shot in his native Amdo and are either entirely or mostly in his native Amdo dialect of Tibetan. Pema’s work has been likened to that of Hou Hsiao-Hsien and Abbas Kiarostami, while his work has been championed by Jia Zhangke who came on board as a producer for Jinpa.
Alongside his work as a writer and director, Pema Tseden was a prolific producer and mentor for a newer generation of filmmakers from Tibet, including his own son Jigme Trinle and his former cinematographer Sonthar Gyal (The Sun Beaten Path, The River).
On 1 May 2023, Pema Tseden set off on a trip towards Lhasa, to help his son Jigme Trinle with a film he was directing and which Pema had written. On 8 May 2023, at over 4,400m above sea level near the high-altitude lake of Yamdruk Tso, Pema was suddenly taken ill and passed away from heart failure at the age of 53.
At the time of his passing, Snow Leopard was in post-production, while Pema had also finished shooting one other film. He is sorely missed by cinephiles, filmmakers and friends alike, as well as the wider global international film community. He is widely considered to be the leading light of the ‘Tibetan New Wave’ – an especially young cinema, and one that is inherently complex. A pioneer and trailblazer, he inspired a new generation of Tibetan filmmakers inside Tibet working amid challenging conditions. Thus, there is an innate bleakness in Pema’s films reflecting the reality of life in Tibet. This is something Pema has talked about - feeling pessimistic and that his films over time came to express a growing inner turbulence.
Snow Leopard premiered at Venice Film Festival 2023 and is the third film by Pema Tseden to be released by Day for Night in the UK and Ireland, following earlier releases of Tharlo in 2016 and Balloon in 2020.
Two heartfelt tributes to Pema Tseden by his collaborator Shide Nyima and Chone Yum Tsering can be found here on the Tibetan cultural website High Peaks Pure Earth which carries translations of Tibetan writings and an excellent resource on contemporary Tibetan culture:
References:
https://treasuryoflives.org/biographies/view/Pema-Tseden/13816 (Dhondup T. Rekjong)
https://yeshe.org/quietly-through-a-tibetan-lens-the-cinematic-legacy-of-pema-tseden/ (Tenzing Sonam)
https://yeshe.org/editorial-introduction/ (Françoise Robin)
https://brooklynrail.org/2016/04/film/pema-tseden-with-lu-yangqiao/ (Pema Tseden in conversation with Lu Yangqiao)