Interbeing: Ecological Nondiscrimination and Its Mediatedness in Snow Leopard

In this chapter, Victor Fan argues that in his penultimate film Snow Leopard (2023), Pema Tseden engages the audience in the larger ontological and ontogenetic rethinking of contemporary Tibetan society as an ecological assemblage. He also questions what ecocinema can and has failed to do infrastructurally. This film does so by enabling spectators to become mindful of their lived experience as an assemblage of multiple mediated realities. Such an assemblage can be seen as an ideal realm of ecological nondiscrimination, which is at once inaccessible and attainable. Here, I define the term ‘infrastructure’ according to Thomas Lamarre’s (The Anime Ecology: A Genealogy of Television, Animation, and Game Media, 2018) understanding as a network of mediating processes that facilitate energetic flows and affective exchanges, which in turn enables the concretisation of specific media objects and assemblages.