Like the community of transgender women at its center, Nepalese drama “Elephants in the Fog” is gentle, fierce, and full of life and contradictions. Making his feature debut, writer-director Abinash Bikram Shah zeroes in on the transactional nature of trans acceptance in South Asia, a fragile prospect he explores through an authentically cast tale of adopted mothers and daughters — which zig-zags into an all-too-familiar mystery of disappearance, albeit one rendered with rich specificity and audiovisual detail.
A remote village by the forest plays host to Shah’s drama, which begins with shapes in the distance, illuminated by torch flame, wandering through the thickets to ward off wild elephants from farmers’ crops. This sense of everyday ritual permeates the rest of the story, which follows middle-aged trans woman Pirati (Pushpa Thing Lama), the self-assured “mother” of her own house of transgender refugees.
She’s a member of a Kinnar community — legally recognized as part of the country’s meti “third gender” — whose own rules and ceremonies bind them together. Pirati has recently adopted lively newcomer and former sex worker Apsara (Aliz Ghimire) as her daughter, an initiation we see playing out for another new arrival, whose hands are painted bright red as she pledges both fealty and celibacy to an alluring local matriarch (Umesha Pandey), who speaks only in whispers.
