Winner of the Un Certain Regard Jury Award Prize at this year’s Festival de Cannes, Abinash Bikram Shah’s Elephants in the Fog, screening at BFI London Film Festival, is a masterclass in atmospheric immersion.
How we treat our animal kingdom isn’t much different to how we often treat each other. We celebrate wild animals, even pray to them, yet we also try to control them, keeping them in their place and stopping them from thriving beyond the limits we’re willing to tolerate. We visit them in purpose-made zoos where we can point, chatter, and giggle at them as they go about their business, and all too often we remove them from their lands. It’s a complicated relationship that mirrors our treatment of many minority groups of humans too.
If you are not from a minority group, your response to that statement may well be to dismiss it immediately. But think for a moment about our world. Forced displacement of powerless groups happens daily; people, like many animals, are expected to conform to expected rules of engagement or be removed; people regularly still walk past LGBTQ+ bars looking in as if they were taking in rare animals in a zoo, and powerless groups still find themselves subject to laws and rules they had no part in creating.
People are taught to fear and avoid some groups because of their differences, or because they may grow too large and threaten the ‘norm’, whatever the majority believes that to be. Writer and director Abinash Bikram Shah’s Elephants in the Fog follows a minority community that has far more in common with the elephants circling the dwindling forests around their village than it may first appear.
In a remote village surrounded by sacred forests that are the last home of the native elephants, a middle-aged trans woman, Pirati (Pushpa Thing Lama), is “mother” to a small group of transgender refugees, many of whom have fled sex work, violence or rejection to find safety in her arms and the arms of the Kinnar community. An ancient third-gender community, the Kinnar are steeped in folklore, both celebrated for their ability to heal and feared for their alleged ability to curse. Pirati rejects both mystical notions, seeing the Kinnar as a family of safety, ancient culture, and urgent social need rather than a spiritual place of curses and healing. Yet, she also knows the folklore surrounding the Kinnar often provides protection.
Like the elephants that circle the village, occasionally breaking through the forest and invading it despite the villagers’ use of torches, sound, and fencing to warn them off, the Kinnar are also kept in their place, their very existence dependent on an uneasy relationship with the local villagers, their role in village life only accepted if they play by the rules imposed upon them.
Pirati has recently become mother to a former sex worker, Apsara (Aliz Ghimire). While seeking safety, Apsara has been unwilling to give up many aspects of her past life, including TikTok and an often fiery, rebellious nature that has led to encounters with local village men, including the soon-to-be-married MJ (Dura Sanjay Gupta). She is a force of nature, and Pirati often finds her exhausting. However, Pirati is also in a rebellious, forbidden relationship with a local musician (Aashant Sharma), and they plan to escape to New Delhi to start a new life when the time is right. However, that time never comes, as Apsara goes missing and community life is thrown into turmoil.
Suddenly, Pirati and the Kinnar community find themselves in conflict with the local villagers as they try to involve the police in Apsara’s disappearance, placing the Kinnar community at risk of eviction from the land they have called home for generations. Like the elephants, they are now circled as Pirati tries to find answers to Apsara’s disappearance in a community where secrets are buried, investigations are intrusive, and tolerance is granted only when the Kinnar obey community rules.
Abinash Bikram Shah’s portrait of the different worlds that circle a community at risk is riveting, as he slowly builds tension that becomes almost suffocating as we move toward a cathartic, stunningly shot finale. Throughout Elephants in the Fog, the Kinnar are surrounded by opposing forces, from towns and cities that use them and then spit them out, to villages that tolerate them at a price; this is a community constantly battling for its survival as its land slowly decreases and its options for movement become ever more restricted.
Winner of the Un Certain Regard Jury Award Prize at this year’s Festival de Cannes, Elephants in the Fog isn’t just a sociopolitical thriller; it’s a stunningly beautiful exploration of two ecosystems at risk of extinction, one a human ecosystem protected in Nepalese law yet often subject to isolation, stigma and community rejection, and the other the estimated 230 wild Asian elephants fighting for survival in ever-decreasing lands that pen them in and deny freedom.
Central to this taut, enthralling story is Pushpa Thing Lama’s natural and powerful performance in her first acting role. A Kinnar community member, Lama’s searingly emotional and utterly captivating performance centres on her need for answers, her guilt over Apsara’s disappearance, and her stoic defence of Kinnar life and tradition. It’s a performance rooted in the intimate bond between mother and daughter, and in the fact that those bonds aren’t always through blood, but through shared experience, identity, and individual struggle.
Pirati’s determination, care and need for justice as community life unravels are only enhanced by Noé Bach’s haunting cinematography. Add to this a score that deftly blends natural sounds and traditional Nepalese music to build a soundscape that envelops the audience, and Elephants in the Fog becomes a masterclass in atmospheric immersion.
Speaking ahead of the film’s BFI London Film Festival screenings, Abinash Bikram Shah’s said, “I hope audiences leave with a sense of empathy that reminds them we are all searching for the same thing, ‘to belong.’ If the film clears even a little of the fog of prejudice, allowing someone to truly see another person, or perhaps even a part of themselves, then I feel the work has done something meaningful”. By coupling the experience of the Kinnar with that of the most majestic and maternal herd creatures on our planet, Shah achieves that wish, and so much more.
Elephants in the Fog arrives in cinemas nationwide in early 2027.
Related Posts
Follow Us