From time to time we discover an extraordinary stylist among China's new generation of filmmakers; within the Chinese cinema, Tian Zhuangzhuang's Horse Thief can be compared only to Chen Kaige's Yellow Earth in its stunning visualization of a stark and remote way of life. Filmed in Tibet with a Tibetan cast, Horse Thief has an ancient timelessness that makes its ostensible setting in 1923 all the more potent. Its sparse narrative is told in pictures (few words)-pictures and colors, as Tian Zhuangzhuang bathes whole scenes in startling blues, oranges, and fire red. On the vast plains of Tibet, a small clan lives alongside a Buddhist shrine, where monks sit fluttering their fans and chanting while the omnipresent carrion birds hover over a hillside filled with ritual paper scraps and possibly the bodies of their fellow animals. Norbu is a young clansman who has taken to horse thievery to survive, but even so cannot support his wife and small child. Intensely religious-their small hut is aglow with the warm orange of votive candles-Norbu is nevertheless tempted to steal a token from the temple for his son, and is ostracized from the clan for this final act of villainy. Set out to wander, Norbu and his small, vulnerable family pass through a land that is stricken with anthrax and join a great migration of people searching for uncontaminated land. But Norbu is the perennial outcast, and the survival of his family seems increasingly doubtful as the film comes to its inevitable conclusion. The brutality of the life cycle-possibly enhanced for Western eyes by the Tibetan Buddhist custom, shown here, of laying dead animals and people out for carrion-silently enfolds Norbu as well. This entirely unique film finds its only comparison outside of China in the works of Armenian director Paradjanov (Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors, Sayat Nova), whose cultural urgency it recalls, yet compared with whose complex mythmaking this seems like abstract art.