During Nepal’s pandemic lockdowns, Abinash Bikram Shah found himself deep in a TikTok rabbit hole, watching videos posted by Kinnars – members of Nepal’s ancient third-gender community – dancing, joking, performing with unselfconscious joy. The comment sections beneath those videos were frequently vile. The Kinnars kept posting.
“That really struck me,” Shah tells Variety. “I didn’t know what made them keep on going, making these videos, even though people had such hate remarks and bad comments.”
That contradiction between public hostility and private resilience became the first spark of “Elephants in the Fog,” which premieres in Un Certain Regard at the Cannes Film Festival – the first Nepali film to be selected for the section.
The film is set in Thori, a forested village in Nepal’s southern Terai plains, far from the mountain imagery that defines the country in the international imagination. Pirati – the word means “love” in Nepali – is the matriarch of a small Kinnar household, bound by her community’s vows of celibacy even as she falls for the local drum master. When wild elephants begin their nightly raids on the village crops, the residents organize patrols. One of Pirati’s daughters disappears on her watch. The police are unmoved. She is left to look alone.
