The Velvet Queen

Marie Amiguet and Vincent Munier's The Velvet Queen (French: La Panthère des neiges) won the César Award for Best Documentary Film at the 47th César Awards in February 2022, after a Special Screening at Cannes 2021. It grossed over €4 million at the French box office on a tiny art-house budget, a remarkable result for a French-language wildlife documentary and one of the highest grosses for any nature film in French cinemas over the past decade.

The film is built around Munier, the wildlife photographer who co-directed it, and the writer Sylvain Tesson, whose 2019 prose memoir La Panthère des neiges had won the Prix Renaudot, one of the major French literary prizes of its year. The book came out of a 2018 expedition to the eastern Tibetan plateau in Qinghai Province (China), at altitudes between 4,200 and 5,000 metres, where Munier had spent several winters waiting for and photographing snow leopards. Tesson's account of the trip won the literary recognition; Amiguet was invited to film the next expedition, in early 2019, with a small four-person crew.

The score is by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, their second feature collaboration; their many other projects together include the soundtracks for The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and Andrew Dominik's Blonde. It was nominated for Best Original Score at the European Film Awards 2021. The film has since been taken up in academic writing on slow cinema and contemplative documentary. Munier has carried on working mainly as a wildlife photographer, not as a feature director, with later expeditions to the Arctic and the Andes.