Pema Tseden

One of the most exciting and inspiring filmmakers to emerge so far this century, Pema Tseden died last year in mid-career, at 53. Born to farmer-herder parents in the Tibetan highlands of Amdo, Qinghai Province, China, he studied Tibetan literature and in the early 1990s began publishing short stories in both Tibetan and Chinese. The first Tibetan to graduate from the prestigious Beijing Film Academy, where he shot two short films, he became the first Tibetan filmmaker working in China to shoot a feature entirely in Tibetan: 2005’s The Silent Holy Stones. Pema Tseden created seven more features, with largely the same group of collaborators, who are now the nucleus of a Tibetan film community continuing his legacy. 

This series covers his career, from the artful realism of his earlier films, which explored the early 21st century lives of rural Tibetans in the People’s Republic of China with carefully framed, exquisitely timed long takes and nonprofessional actors, to his later works, in which he experimented with a visionary, occasionally hallucinatory visual style that opened audiences to the more fantastical, spiritual dimensions of Tibetan experience. Given Pema Tseden’s complicated position as a Tibetan in China, and the necessity of having his films pass stringent Chinese censorship, his ability to tell these stories directly, naturally, and eloquently, in films of such quiet, rhapsodic beauty, is nothing short of astonishing. 

Guest programmed by Shelly Kraicer 

Co-sponsored by OVID.tv