{"id":125,"date":"2026-05-18T06:34:59","date_gmt":"2026-05-18T06:34:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/relocationobserver.com\/?p=125"},"modified":"2026-05-18T06:34:59","modified_gmt":"2026-05-18T06:34:59","slug":"from-tiktok-to-cannes-how-elephants-in-the-fog-made-nepals-historic-un-certain-regard-breakthrough","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/relocationobserver.com\/?p=125","title":{"rendered":"From TikTok to Cannes: How \u2018Elephants in the Fog\u2019 Made Nepal\u2019s Historic Un Certain Regard Breakthrough"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\n\tDuring Nepal\u2019s pandemic lockdowns, Abinash Bikram Shah found himself deep in a TikTok rabbit hole, watching videos posted by Kinnars \u2013 members of Nepal\u2019s ancient third-gender community \u2013 dancing, joking, performing with unselfconscious joy. The comment sections beneath those videos were frequently vile. The Kinnars kept posting.<\/p>\n

Read more Korea Box Office: Michael Jackson Biopic \u2018Michael\u2019 Dominates Weekend with Over 50% Market Share<\/a><\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThat really struck me,\u201d Shah tells Variety<\/em>. \u201cI didn\u2019t know what made them keep on going, making these videos, even though people had such hate remarks and bad comments.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThat contradiction between public hostility and private resilience became the first spark of \u201cElephants in the Fog,\u201d which premieres in Un Certain Regard at the Cannes Film Festival \u2013 the first Nepali film to be selected for the section.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe film is set in Thori, a forested village in Nepal\u2019s southern Terai plains, far from the mountain imagery that defines the country in the international imagination. Pirati \u2013 the word means \u201clove\u201d in Nepali \u2013 is the matriarch of a small Kinnar household, bound by her community\u2019s 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\u2019s daughters disappears on her watch. The police are unmoved. She is left to look alone.<\/p>\n

\n\tShah describes himself as a writer first, a director only when a story is close enough to demand it. He co-wrote Min Bahadur Bham\u2019s \u201cShambhala,\u201d which competed at Berlin in 2024, and \u201cThe Black Hen,\u201d Nepal\u2019s Oscar submission that premiered in Venice Critics Week. His short \u201cLori\u201d earned a Special Mention at Cannes in 2022, making him the first Nepali filmmaker in the festival\u2019s official selection. This year\u2019s Un Certain Regard invitation moves the foothold considerably further.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe honor sits uneasily alongside a sharper anxiety. \u201cIt\u2019s between pride and pressure,\u201d he says. \u201cThe pressure for me is more about the story \u2013 because I\u2019m a man, I\u2019ve done the story of a trans woman, and I really want to know, honestly from the audience, how honestly I\u2019ve told the story.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe 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 \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt was like love at first sight,\u201d he says. \u201cShe is so charming. When she is joyful, she is so joyful. When she is silent, her presence in the silence works so well.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe 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 \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

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\n\tA 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 \u2013 perceiving only a fragment and calling it the whole.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cMost importantly, I have to show them as a human being like anyone of us in the world,\u201d Shah says.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe elephants that crowd the edges of the film are more than atmosphere. In the Terai region, they are a practical reality \u2013 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 \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

\n\tTo contain and observe those elephants, the villagers use firecrackers, electric fences, and \u2013 in one image Shah finds particularly resonant \u2013 eyes painted onto tree trunks, a human appeal to the forest to look back and see them.<\/p>\n

\n\tShah 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 No\u00e9 Bach took visual cues from Nan Goldin\u2019s photography of the 1980s and \u201990s, aiming for images that feel found rather than arranged. Composer Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Alvarez built a score that moves between traditional Nepali sounds and something more fractured and modern, designed to track Pirati\u2019s inner journey from quiet containment to something rawer.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe 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\u2019s relationship to that context, and equally clear that it was not the engine of the work.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cTo tell a story about the Kinnar community in a society that often prefers they remain invisible is, by its nature, a political act,\u201d he says. \u201cBut I didn\u2019t want Pirati to be a \u2018political symbol\u2019. I wanted her to be a woman who is tired, who is in love, and who is searching for a home. My \u2018politics\u2019 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cElephants in the Fog\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

Read more Miike Takashi Makes Documentary Debut as Japan\u2019s K2 Pictures Unveils Slate and $33 Million Fund at Cannes<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Nepali director Abinash Bikram Shah on ‘Elephants in the Fog,’ the first Nepali film in Cannes Un Certain Regard.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":124,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[3,153],"class_list":["post-125","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-film","tag-cannes-film-festival","tag-elephants-in-the-fog"],"yoast_head":"\nFrom TikTok to Cannes: How \u2018Elephants in the Fog\u2019 Made Nepal\u2019s Historic Un Certain Regard Breakthrough - Relocation Observer<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/relocationobserver.com\/?p=125\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"From TikTok to Cannes: How \u2018Elephants in the Fog\u2019 Made Nepal\u2019s Historic Un Certain Regard Breakthrough - 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