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Nepal’s Academy Awards entry “Elephants in the Fog” is the sole Nepali film at the Toronto Film Festival, where director Abinash Bikram Shah has turned the film’s international visibility toward the floods devastating
communities back home – among them people directly connected to the production.
Lead actress Puspa Thing Lama is from Nuwakot district, one of the worst-affected areas. Co-producer Prachanda Man Singh Shrestha, also from Nuwakot, has lost his home. “There is something difficult about watching a film travel internationally while people close to it are dealing with the loss of homes and livelihoods,” Shah tells Variety.
The production has already held a fundraising screening in Kathmandu, channeling the proceeds to the Prime Minister Disaster Relief Fund, and has worked with the Zonta Club and Rotary Clubs on support for children caught in the Bhotekoshi flooding. On Sept. 17, the film’s French production and distribution partners are staging a Paris screening, with Nepal’s Ambassador to France among those expected to attend; the evening’s distributor revenue will go to Nepal’s flood-relief fund. “We know that a film cannot solve a disaster,” Shah says. “But cinema can gather people in a room, create attention and sometimes turn that attention into action.”
The floods have also complicated the local release in Nepal. “It is hard to ask people to go to a cinema when many are dealing with displacement, loss and uncertainty,” he says. Despite that, “Elephants in the Fog” has carried into its second week since opening Sept. 4, taking in some NPR69 lakh ($45,000) in its first seven days. “But the conversations after screenings have meant just as much to us as the box office,” Shah says.
At the center of the film is Pirati, matriarch of a Kinnar community in a forested Nepalese village, played by first-time screen actress Puspa Thing Lama, who has spent decades as an LGBTIQA+ rights advocate. “She is not simply a representative of a ‘third gender’ community. She is a mother and a leader, with authority, affection, fears and contradictions,” Shah says.
Lama traveled to Cannes when the film took the Un Certain Regard Jury Prize and is now in Toronto. “There is something powerful about seeing someone who has spent decades working to make her community visible now occupying these spaces in her own right, not as a subject being discussed, but as an artist whose performance is being recognized,” Shah says. The Asia Pacific Screen Awards have nominated her for best performance; the film also picked up nods for best film and best director.
“I was drawn to the Kinnar community because of the richness and complexity of the community beyond the marginalization,” he says. The relationships between the women gradually became the film’s core – a story about mothers and daughters, and about people creating family when the structures around them have rejected them.
Sales company Best Friend Forever has closed deals across 14 territories. New agreements place the film with MetFilm Distribution in the U.K., Filmin in Spain, Vedette in Benelux, Trigon in Switzerland, Lev Cinema in Israel, Jayantii in Australia, EFAR Films in India, PT Falcon in Indonesia, the Film Development Council of the Philippines and Silk Route for inflight. Those join previously announced deals with Arizona Distribution and Les Valseurs Distribution in France, missingFILMs in Germany and Austria, Imovision in Brazil and The Tea Folks Films for domestic Nepal distribution. A pan-Latin America deal is expected shortly; North American rights are in advanced negotiations.
“The film has traveled much further than we ever expected, but its meaning remains rooted in the place where it began,” Shah says.
