Directed by Marie Amiguet and Vincent Munier. Reviewed by Paul Sorrell

To say that I was looking forward to this film about French wildlife photographer Vincent Munier’s hunt for the legendary snow leopard in the highlands of Tibet would be an understatement. In the end, The Velvet Queen delivered all I had hoped for, and much more.

A nature photographer with an international reputation, famous for his ghostlike images of animals set in snowy landscapes, Munier is here paired with writer Sylvain Tesson as they seek the elusive big cat in the vast uplands of Tibet. But this is very much a film about the journey, not the arrival, and we follow the two adventurers through sunshine and blizzards, over mountains and prairies as they capture the landscape and its animal inhabitants in powerful words and mesmerising images. The stunning cinematography by co-director Marie Amiguet forms a perfect complement to their work.

The film offers us more than an eye-popping parade of exotic animals and landscapes, although this would have been satisfying enough. Writer Tesson, new to the rigours of alpine expeditions (at least on this extreme scale), is in constant dialogue with seasoned outdoorsman Munier, questioning him about his methods, aims and philosophy as a recorder and interpreter of the natural world.

For Munier, spending hours, days, weeks in spartan hides in often freezing conditions, waiting for the magic conjunction of light, background and fleeting subject, gives life a vital edge denied to those who have chosen to direct their lives along more conventional paths. Increasingly cut off from nature, we cease to value it.

Munier regrets that he has had to travel further and further away from home to find the few truly wild, pristine places left on the planet — places where nature is still in charge. He laments that in his home region of France the fauna is thinning out, trees and hedgerows cut down. For him, this thoughtless destruction amounts to “a lack of respect for life”. For his part, Tesson has learned many valuable life lessons from his companion, including the virtues of attention and patience.

There is much more I could say about The Velvet Queen: its entrancing imagery, powerful but unobtrusive score by Warren Ellis and Nick Cave, and its quietly expressed philosophy of nature that is profoundly relevant to the current predicament faced by Planet Earth. But my best advice is simply to see, marvel and, where you can, act on the lessons it provides. 

Tui Motu Magazine. Issue 271 2022: 28