May 20, 2026 3:43am PT

‘Elephants in the Fog’ Review: A Riveting Nepalese Drama About a Transgender Community

In his potent feature debut, premiering in Un Certain Regard at Cannes, Abinash Bikram Shah humanizes and empowers Nepal’s Kinnar women.

Siddhant Adlakha

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Siddhant Adlakha

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Courtesy of UTN, Les Valseurs, DGS

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.