Jinpa

On the empty road across the Kekexili plateau in Tibet, a truck driver runs over a sheep. He puts the animal in the truck and drives on. A little later he picks up a hitchhiker at the roadside. The man wears a silver dagger at his belt and says in the cab that he is going to find and kill the man who murdered his father ten years ago. Then it emerges that both of them are called Jinpa. Pema Tseden's film was adapted from two short stories and runs eighty-six minutes. After the hitchhiker gets out, the driver goes after him; what either man will do is no longer clear. The director shoots Tibet neither as a tourist nor as a political landscape; the road, the emptiness and two men are enough. The image is in a square format and the colour changes inside the telling. The film won best screenplay in the Orizzonti section at Venice in 2018.