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 and was a Special Screening at Cannes 2021. The film grossed over €4 million at the French box office on a tiny art-house budget — an extraordinary commercial outcome for a French-language wildlife documentary, and one of the highest-grossing nature films at the French theatrical box office of the past decade.

The film is built around the wildlife photographer Vincent Munier — co-director of the film — and the writer Sylvain Tesson, whose 2019 prose memoir La Panthère des neiges had won the Prix Renaudot, one of the most significant French literary prizes of its year. The book had emerged from a 2018 expedition to the eastern Tibetan plateau in Qinghai Province (China) at altitudes between 4,200 and 5,000 metres, where Munier had been waiting for and photographing snow leopards across multiple winters. Tesson's prose record of the trip generated 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 after numerous earlier projects, including the soundtracks for The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and Andrew Dominik's Blonde; the score was nominated for Best Original Score at the European Film Awards 2021. The film is now widely cited in academic literature on slow-cinema and contemplative-documentary filmmaking; Munier has continued to work principally as a wildlife photographer rather than as a feature director, with subsequent expeditions to the Arctic and the Andes.