“A film that does not ask to be watched so much as absorbed, and that lingers in the body long after the images have faded away.”

Abinash Bikram Shah has been moving toward this film for years — through the Sundance Institute, Berlinale Talents, and the Locarno Filmmakers Academy; through co-writing Nepal’s Oscar entries The Black Hen and Shambhala; through Lori, his short film that made him the first Nepali director in an official Cannes selection and which walked away with a Jury Special Mention in 2022. The preparation was exemplary. The arrival is extraordinary. Elephants in the Fog, his debut feature premiering in Un Certain Regard, is a work of shattering visual beauty and queer political ferocity — a film that does not ask to be watched so much as absorbed, and that lingers in the body long after the images have faded away.

The setting is Thori, a village in Nepal’s southern belt, where the jungle is not scenery but conscience — a breathing, morally alive presence that withholds as much as it reveals. Here, Pirati presides over a household of Kinnar women, members of a third-gender community whose place in South Asian society is as ancient as it is precarious. Sanskrit scripture acknowledged their existence without crisis. Contemporary Nepal is less generous sadly. Revered in ritual, refused in daily life — invited to bless and feared as a curse — the Kinnar occupy the position that René Girard, in Violence and the Sacred, named the pharmakos: the sacred scapegoat whose expulsion purifies the community that cannot exist without them. In an era when gender non-conforming lives are weaponised as political currency across the globe, this film arrives as something more than cinema. It arrives as a testimony.

When Chameli — one of Pirati’s daughters, played with devastating quietness by Jasmin Bishwokarma — disappears during a nightly patrol against wild elephants and is found dead, partially burned, the pharmakos logic snaps shut around the narrative with terrible finality. The bond between them is not biological. It is something the film understands as deeper: the liens électifs of a queer kinship built from shared necessity, daily tenderness, and the stubborn refusal to disappear. Her charred body echoes Walter Burkert’s account of the ancient rite — the burning, the expulsion, the violent catharsis visited upon whoever a society has designated as its necessary sacrifice. Shah does not editorialize. He does not need to. The images know.

Pushpa Thing Lama’s performance as Pirati is one of the great screen performances of recent years. Lama is a transgender woman and social activist who has spent more than two decades at the forefront of LGBTQIA+ rights work in Nepal — and what she brings to the role is the one thing no technique can teach: the specific gravity of someone who has lived, in her own body, the precise terrain the film traverses. Her Pirati is regal without hauteur, wounded without self-pity. She has built her authority from what was taken from her, and she carries it accordingly. The présence she commands is not performed. It simply is. Shah spent years helping her unlearn the reflex toward artifice — the instinct to signal feeling rather than inhabit it — and the result is acting of such unguarded truth that the camera seems at times to flinch from its own intrusion.

The ensemble around her is equally alive and emotionally captivating. Aliz Ghimire’s Apsara burns with a restless, ungovernable energy — a daughter in permanent excess of the household’s careful equilibrium. Joel Gurung’s Maya carries her grief so far inward it registers as a change in atmospheric pressure rather than emotion. Din Miya’s Joon — the Drum Master, the mustachioed object of Pirati’s most dangerous longing — brings a warmth that makes the film’s central impossibility feel genuinely irresolvable. And Drishti Gauri Malla’s DSP, cold and bureaucratically indifferent to Chameli’s fate, is the film’s most chilling figure: the state wearing a human face. Together they build something the camera alone could never provide. A world. The community these women inhabit pulses with contradiction and specificity — with the irreplaceable texture of lives that know, from the inside, what they are risking by being seen.

Cinematographer Noé Bach’s work is extraordinary. The visual touchstone is Nan Goldin’s Ballad of Sexual Dependency — its insistence on tenderness as the purest form of truth — and what Shah and Bach have achieved is a transposition of that ethic into the overwhelming physical reality of the Nepalese jungle. The images feel trouvés rather than composed, discovered in the act of looking rather than arranged in advance. The jungle is shot with a beauté inquiétante — lush, voluptuous, and faintly menacing — while Birgunj, the border city where Pirati meets her lover in the liberating anonymity of crowds, is rendered in concrete and noise, its apparent harshness a strange form of mercy. The framing is a moral act throughout: the camera’s distance from or closeness to each character encodes the film’s entire argument about visibility, shame, and the cost of being known.

Andrew Bird and Paris J. Ludwig’s editing — the latter a trans woman whose perspective Shah understood as structurally essential — holds the film’s generic multiplicity in suspension without strain. The montage breathes. It moves between communal ritual and private interiority with the logic of association rather than causation, accumulating emotional weight so gradually that its full mass only becomes apparent in the final act. Frédéric Alvarez’s score begins as something barely audible — a murmur from deep within Nepalese musical tradition — and fractures, over the course of the film, into something raw and exposed: a sonic déchirement that mirrors Pirati’s unravelling. It is not a score. It is a weather system.

The elephants. They move through the film’s periphery — matriarchal, ancient, venerated in the Hindu tradition as vessels of divine intelligence, and yet repelled at the edge of human cultivation with firecrackers and electric fences and eyes painted on tree trunks, hollow and staring and frightened. Those painted eyes are the film’s most compressed image: the face a society turns toward whatever exceeds its capacity for categorisation. The fog that surrounds these creatures is the same fog in which the Kinnar women move — the cultivated unknowing of a community that depends, for its own coherence, on keeping certain lives just beyond the reach of full acknowledgement.

Pirati’s choice — between the man she loves and the daughters who need her, between a private life and a collective one — is never resolved. Shah is too honest for that in the end. What the film offers instead is something rarer: the full, unsentimentalized weight of a life in which every direction carries a cost, and in which the only available form of freedom is the decision about which cost to bear. The fog does not lift. But within it, if you look — there is warmth, and motion, and the vast, unhurried intelligence of creatures that have survived everything the world has thrown at them. So have these women. That is enough. That is everything.

(c) Image copyright: Underground Talkies Nepal, Les Valseurs, DSG