THIS IS A FIRST for me as I pound my well-trodden media beat. I’ll confess I had never seen a Tibetan film until I saw the hauntingly resonant ‘Jinpa’. And now I want to see more – at least, if they’re made by director and novelist Pema Tseden. (He has directed five previous movies for us to choose from.)    

Saying that this exquisitely-shot and edited film is a mixture of road-movie and tense mystery, with a touch of immersive ethnography thrown in, goes some way to describe it, but still falls way short of capturing its uniqueness – or its hypnotic story-telling.

I was compellingly seized right from the opening shot, which places us with almost interminable languor in the windswept plains and 16,000-feet high mountain-passes of Tibet’s Kekexili region. And even before the stark and thinly-populated terrain is revealed, sparely written captions warn us that among the local clan it is considered a disgrace if, when any revenge is required, it is not exacted.

The film’s eponymous protagonist is a truck driver delivering necessities to a distant community, and early on we are given an insight into Jinpa’s greatest source of happiness (his never-seen daughter) while he listens, with great dedication despite multiple distractions, to a cassette recording of the classic Neapolitan love-song ‘O Sole Mio’. It’s conveyed as such a soulful rendering that my inexpert ear – here’s another somewhat shameful confession – mistook the singer at first for maestro Pavarotti. It’s in fact the Tibetan singer Tashi Phundar – no slouch, I’d say, as an emotive tenor.

Two events occur on Jinpa’s route – each with an ominous resonance. First, the truck runs over a sheep, perhaps killing it (unless it was already dead as well as unnoticed), which later prompts Jinpa to plead with a monk for a prayer to ease the sheep’s soul for its onward journey … to wherever. Then there’s also an uncanny human encounter on the road – with a taciturn hitchhiker who announces without drama that he’s on his way to commit a murder. He happens to have the same name as our driver. (The driving Jinpa, is by the way, played by an actor – and poet – who also happens to carry Jinpa as his mononym.)

THE NARRATIVE UNFOLDS from here on in ways that are quietly enthralling – with scenes at times marked by an attention-holding but non-intrusive use of a partial lens-blur. This works to provide us with some unflashy flash-backs that all coalesce into a Rashomon-like reconstruction of events, possible or otherwise. By a certain point they can take on a semi-hallucinatory quality.

Tseden is the first filmmaker to create films entirely in the Tibetan language under Chinese rule. That he continues to work so creatively within China’s cramping censorship is testimony to his subtle ingenuity. He has no illusions about his people’s position (he told The New York Times about being insulted as a schoolboy by Chinese fellow-students calling him an enslaved peasant) and his films deal plain-spokenly with Tibetan life from a Tibetan’s viewpoint.  The Times carried an assessment from Tsering Shakya, a University of British Columbia professor of Tibetan literature and society: “Tseden’s films are authentic in the way that they capture the issues that bind every Tibetan.”

There are some tellingly enigmatic lines in the song that plays over Jinpa’s end-credits, saying “at the source of sympathy and compassion, is the company of a dictator”. Exactly how the unpropitious story of the trucker and the murderous hitch-hiker has ended by the time the credits roll I should not reveal. Suffice to say I wouldn’t want to disagree with Tseden’s reverberating adage:

If I tell you my dream, you might forget it. If I act on my dream perhaps you will remember it. But if I involve you in it, it becomes your dream too.

***

JINPA premiered globally at the Venice Film Festival, fittingly enough in its broad ‘Horizons’ program.

It is currently showing at New York’s Asia Society – and will be traveling further on the festival circuit and elsewhere. See the website of its distributor Icarus Films for screening dates – and/or for a home-video copy.