From TikTok to Cannes: How ‘Elephants in the Fog’ Made Nepal’s Historic Un Certain Regard Breakthrough

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.”

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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.

Shah describes himself as a writer first, a director only when a story is close enough to demand it. He co-wrote Min Bahadur Bham’s “Shambhala,” which competed at Berlin in 2024, and “The Black Hen,” Nepal’s Oscar submission that premiered in Venice Critics Week. His short “Lori” earned a Special Mention at Cannes in 2022, making him the first Nepali filmmaker in the festival’s official selection. This year’s Un Certain Regard invitation moves the foothold considerably further.

The honor sits uneasily alongside a sharper anxiety. “It’s between pride and pressure,” he says. “The pressure for me is more about the story – because I’m a man, I’ve done the story of a trans woman, and I really want to know, honestly from the audience, how honestly I’ve told the story.”

The weight of that responsibility shaped every stage of the production, beginning with casting. Shah had been spending time with Kinnar communities across Nepal for nearly two years before he encountered Puspa Thing Lama at a community function – before, he says, he had even finished the screenplay. Lama is a veteran LGBTQIA+ rights advocate who has worked with the Blue Diamond Society Nepal since 2006. She had never acted. Shah was not deterred.

“It was like love at first sight,” he says. “She is so charming. When she is joyful, she is so joyful. When she is silent, her presence in the silence works so well.”

The path from that instinct to the finished performance was long and complicated. Lama had spent years absorbing the heightened emotional register of Nepali and Indian television drama, and her early workshop sessions leaned in that direction. Shah spent months drawing her away from technique and toward something more exposed. The breakthrough, he says, came through trust rather than craft instruction – the moment Lama understood that what she was being asked to do was not perform a character but bring her own history into the frame.

A parable offered by one of the Kinnar women Shah interviewed during his research stayed with him throughout. She described a group of blind men trying to understand the shape of an elephant by touch: one feels the leg and calls it a pillar, another grasps the tail and imagines a rope. The outside world, she said, approaches the Kinnar community the same way – perceiving only a fragment and calling it the whole.

“Most importantly, I have to show them as a human being like anyone of us in the world,” Shah says.

The elephants that crowd the edges of the film are more than atmosphere. In the Terai region, they are a practical reality – intelligent, matriarchal animals that farmers fear and Hindu tradition venerates through the figure of Ganesha. Shah was drawn to the same logic governing both: tolerated within their designated space, threatening the moment they cross a boundary someone else has drawn. When he described the parallel to Lama, she told him she recognized it from her own life – that even now, living openly as a trans woman while working within an NGO, she sometimes feels like an elephant carrying something enormous inside a set of rules not designed for her.

To contain and observe those elephants, the villagers use firecrackers, electric fences, and – in one image Shah finds particularly resonant – eyes painted onto tree trunks, a human appeal to the forest to look back and see them.

Shah worked with two editors on the film: the experienced Andrew Bird and Paris J. Ludwig, who is herself a trans woman, and whose perspective Shah considered essential to the material. Cinematographer Noé Bach took visual cues from Nan Goldin’s photography of the 1980s and ’90s, aiming for images that feel found rather than arranged. Composer Frédéric Alvarez built a score that moves between traditional Nepali sounds and something more fractured and modern, designed to track Pirati’s inner journey from quiet containment to something rawer.

The film arrives at a moment when gender non-conforming people are being openly weaponized in political discourse across multiple countries. Shah is clear-eyed about the film’s relationship to that context, and equally clear that it was not the engine of the work.

“To tell a story about the Kinnar community in a society that often prefers they remain invisible is, by its nature, a political act,” he says. “But I didn’t want Pirati to be a ‘political symbol’. I wanted her to be a woman who is tired, who is in love, and who is searching for a home. My ‘politics’ is the belief that the most radical thing an artist can do is to treat a character from the margins with the same complexity and tenderness as anyone else. For me, politics must always grow out of the human truth, not the other way around, otherwise it would be an agenda.”

“Elephants in the Fog” is an international co-production across Nepal, Germany, Brazil, France, and Norway, produced by Underground Talkies Nepal, Les Valseurs, and Die Gesellschaft DGS. International sales are handled by Best Friend Forever. French distribution will be handled by Les Valseurs Distribution and Arizona Distribution.