Cannes 2026 (Un Certain Regard): Elephants in the Fog | Interview with Abinash Bikram Shah

The only Nepali film in Un Certain Regard brought back immense memories for the shy and soft-spoken director Abinash Bikram Shah, who, along with his cast, could not hide his emotions as the audience erupted in a standing ovation. “We are here!” said his lead actor, Puspa Thing Lama, in disbelief, unable to stop shaking with happiness when we sat down for an interview on a pleasant sunny afternoon on the terrace of the Palais.

Nepali writer-director Abinash Bikram Shah’s Elephants in the Fog arrives at Cannes carrying a quietly radical question: what does it mean to truly see another human being? The filmmaker tells a story as vast and as misunderstood as the animal in its title.

There is a particular kind of stillness that filmmakers carry with them, not aloofness, but attention. A sense that they are always, quietly, watching. Abinash Bikram Shah has it. He is soft-spoken and all smiles now that his film Elephants in the Fog has had its screening.

His film, Elephants in the Fog, is the kind of cinema that does not let you go easily, not because it shocks or overwhelms, but because it does something rarer: it insists that you look at people you have spent your whole life looking past.

The film is set in the Kinner (the third gender) community of Thuri, a village on the fringes of Nepal’s Chitwan National Park, where the jungle breathes close and the Indian border is never far. At its heart is Pireti, a kinner woman navigating love, family, and the weight of a world that cannot quite decide what she is. It is shot with the patience of someone who spent years, not weeks, earning the trust of the people on screen. That patience, it turns out, is the whole story.

“Writing is a lonely process; you just look inside, and you become the character. Directing is chaos. And in that chaos, you find something you never could have planned,” says Abinash, who began his career and built a reputation entirely on the written word. His first script, for Deepak Rauniyar’s Highway in 2012, was at the Berlinale. More international commissions followed: Min Bahadur Bham’s Kalo Pothi went to Venice; Shambhala, which he co-wrote, made it to Berlin. He has spent over a decade placing other directors’ visions at the world’s most significant festivals. Directing, when it came, arrived almost by accident and was nearly abandoned altogether.

“I directed a short film in between that didn’t quite work,” he says, with the ease of a man long past needing to protect his ego from the truth. “It went to Busan, but not the European festivals I had hoped for. I thought perhaps I simply wasn’t cut out for it.”

But then came Lori, his short film that competed at Cannes. When it made the selection, something rearranged itself in his understanding of what he was capable of. “Seeing it in competition here, I thought, okay. I can direct.” He pauses, smiles. “But it took Cannes to convince me.”

The difference between writing and directing, he says, is the difference between solitude and beautiful disorder. “Writing, you just look inside. You become the character, you go very deep, and it is just you. Directing is completely different. So chaotic. And in that chaos, you find creativity you never could have planned,” he adds.

When we begin to question his film and the title, Abinash says, “To understand Elephants in the Fog, you have to understand what it is not. It is not an issues film, despite its subject. It is not a piece of social documentation dressed in narrative clothes. It is, at its simplest and most profound, a film about a mother and a daughter — the chosen kind, the kind forged not by blood but by need, recognition, and time.”

Pireti, the protagonist, is a young kinner woman living within the chosen family structure that defines community life for many kinners across South Asia. She falls in love. She longs for permanence. The world around her — the village, the forest, the men who come and go — refuses to make space for what she is. The film watches her without judgment and without explanation, trusting that to see her fully is enough.

The landscape is not backdrop, but for the filmmaker, it is argument. The lush, pressing forest of Chitwan, where wild elephants move at the edge of human settlements, mirrors the film’s central tension: what is wild, what is sacred, what is feared, and what is driven away. There is a scene where the sound of the jungle at night becomes almost unbearable in its beauty and menace. Abinash shoots it like a man who has spent a great deal of time listening.

The performances are non-professional. “The dialogue was never fully scripted. I gave them the situation, the emotional truth of the scene, and let them find their way there,” he says. “The result has the irreproducible texture of real life: people speaking in the rhythms of actual thought, actual feeling, actual hesitation.”

The title, I confess, had pleasantly puzzled me since I first read it. When I ask Abinash about it, he takes his time and produces what is, to my mind, the most precise and poetic statement of artistic intent I have heard at this year’s festival.

“One of the mothers in the community told me the old story,” he begins, the kind of “old story” that turns out to be infinitely current. “Six blind men, each feeling a different part of the elephant. Each one convinced they have grasped the truth. But none of them can see the whole animal.” She used it to describe how South Asian society sees the kinner community: fragmented, partial, wilfully incomplete. “Either we are people with the power to bless and curse, or we are sex workers, or we are NGO workers. They put us in a box. They never see us as full human beings.”

But the metaphor, as Abinash worked with it, kept expanding. There is Ganesha — the elephant god, the remover of obstacles, worshipped across the subcontinent. And there are the forest elephants of Chitwan, venerated in the abstract but feared and chased when they leave the tree line and enter human space.

“We worship the elephant when it stays in its place,” he says, “but the moment it comes out, it becomes a danger. And all along, it is we who invaded their space. That contradiction — that is the film. My job was to bring the elephant out of the fog. To make it visible. To make it whole.”

He says this without theatre, without the self-consciousness of a man delivering a manifesto. He says it the way writers say true things: simply, and only once.

The film was not born in a scriptwriting room. It was born on a phone screen during lockdown, when Abinash found himself scrolling through TikTok videos made by kinner women — joyful, funny, alive — and was struck by the violence of the comments beneath them. “The contrast was so sharp,” he says. “These warm, funny women and these harsh, dehumanising words underneath. I thought: I need to know who these people really are.”

When restrictions lifted, he drove to the community without a camera, without a pitch, without a plan. He was invited in for dinner on his first visit. “Paneer (cottage cheese) and chaap. On the very first night.” He smiles at the memory. “I think perhaps not many people like me come to their homes simply to know them. But of course there was also the wariness: here is a filmmaker, perhaps he wants to profit from our story. That was there. It took a long time to dissolve.”

Two years of meetings preceded the shoot. He did not give the cast the full script. He did not ask them to rehearse lines. He arrived on set each day knowing the scene and trusting the people.

“For writing someone else’s film, you let go; finally, it belongs to the director. But when I write and direct, what is on the page must be what is on the screen. Except that here, what was on the screen came from them — their lives, their language, their truth. The script was a skeleton. They were the body.”

Thuri, where the film was shot, sits in the Barsa area of Chitwan district, close enough to the Indian border that Bhojpuri drifts through the air alongside Nepali. Abinash chose it deliberately; the geography is inseparable from the story’s emotional register. The forest is not picturesque. It is present. It presses in.

“In the Terai region, kinners go to homes to give blessings. But they also perform — they must, because a blessing alone can be dull. So the songs come from that tradition, from their reality. Every word in those songs belongs to them.”

Abinash is not naive about what a Cannes selection does and does not do. He is happy — genuinely, quietly happy — the way people are when good things happen to work they have sacrificed for. “Being here matters not just for the film, but for the subject. This community. This story. Visibility at a place like Cannes changes what people are willing to consider, what stories they will sit with. That matters to me more than any prize.”

Elephants in the Fog won the Jury Award at the ceremony held on 22 May 2026 in the Un Certain Regard section at the 79th Cannes Film Festival.

Our team is on site for the 79th Cannes Film Festival, from May 12 to 23, 2026.