Abinash Bikram Shah | Through the Fog, He Found His Authentic Truth, The Buzz Nepal July 2026 Cover Story

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The Buzz Nepal
July 3 , 2026

HowElephants in the FogIs His Most Personal Truth

Who Is Abinash Bikram Shah?

I am a filmmaker and screenwriter from Nepal. Before I ever sat in a director’s chair, I spent years writing for other directors, and that period shaped me more than anything else. It taught me the discipline of collaboration, the craft of storytelling, and thepatienceof working inside someone else’s vision while slowly uncovering my own.

I am drawn to the quiet, unspectacular corners of everyday life, to people who exist at the edges of what society considers visible or worthy. I am compelled by stories about belonging and the fragile ways people build kinship in a world that often refuses to see them. That is where my cinema lands.

What Elephants in the Fog Is About

Elephants in the Fog is Shah’s directorial debut, set in Thori, a village in the Terai plains near Chitwan. The film follows Pirati, the matriarch of a Kinnar community, whose plans to leave with the person she loves unravel after her daughter goes missing. It stars Pushpa Thing Lama, Deepika Yadav, Jasmine Bishwokarma, Aliz Ghimire, and Dura Sanjay Kumar Gupta, and runs 103 minutes. The film is a co-production between Nepal, France, Germany, Brazil, and Norway, and had its world premiere at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival.

If you met me for the first time, knowing nothing about my films, I would want you to understand one thing: my silence is often mistaken for distance, but it is simply my way of listening. I believe that even inside the heaviest chaos, there is a fundamentalgoodnessin people worth searching for.

Outside the chaos of a film set, I carry a duality. I am a private, observant person who needs long hours of silence, yet I also have an enthusiasm for the world outside, for meeting people and listening to their lived experiences. The quality I was born with, I think, is a deep sensitivity toward the people around me. That empathy creates a space where others feel an immediate sense of closeness and dignity.

Why I Made Elephants in the Fog

My draw toward marginalized lives was never a sudden realization. It grew slowly. When you do not fit the shapes society builds around success and identity, your eyes naturally move toward the edges, not out of curiosity or pity, but something closer to survival.

I saw my own isolation reflected in these communities, my own longing for a place of safety. I was not observing from a distance. I was recognizing a shared struggle to find a corner of the world where you are simply allowed to exist. Writing about them became the only honest way I knew how to heal and make sense of my own life.

The Artists Who Taught Me How to Look

Three names shaped this film more than any others: Satyajit Ray, Hou Hsiao-hsien, and Nan Goldin. From Ray, I learned emotional clarity, finding the extraordinary rhythm inside the ordinary grind of survival. Hou Hsiao-hsien taught me the power of silence, how an environment, a fog, an empty doorway, a room at dusk, can carry as much weight as dialogue. From Nan Goldin’s photography, I understood intimacy in its rawest form. She photographed marginalized communities from within, with a fearless tenderness that feels like family. From her, I understood that you cannot truly film a community unless you are willing to live emotionally alongside them.

In Elephants in the Fog, that influence shows in the safety we created on set. Our lens never gazes at these women as a spectacle. It breathes with them as equals.

Before I Begin

Every Frame Carries Something of Me

Every frame carries something of me, hidden in the quietest corners: the way a character hesitates before speaking, the exhaustion on someone’s shoulders at the end of a long day, the small domestic rituals of making tea or doing chores.

Before writing a new project, I need to empty myself of the noise of the industry, of expectations, of whatever the last project left behind. I have to understand the world my characters live in down to its most mundane details. Beyond that, I interrogate myself: what am I actually saying, and why does it need to be said now? A project begins only when the personal truth of the character meets the urgent truth of the moment we are living in.

The specific events belong to the community’s lived reality. But the emotional ache underneath, the vulnerability, the longing for safety, that is entirely mine. I do not think I could have told this story otherwise. You can only truly write what you already know how to feel.

The Award

Elephants in the Fog won the Jury Prize in the Un Certain Regard section at the 79th Cannes Film Festival in May 2026, becoming the first Nepali film to win an award at Cannes. The film was also nominated for the Camera d’Or and the Queer Palm. Shah’s short film Lori had earlier received a Special Mention at Cannes in 2022, the first Nepali short film to receive that recognition.

What Comes Next

I am developing two new projects in differentcreativeterritories, one at an advanced stage, the other still early. Both pull me toward the same human terrains that have always fascinated me.

To young filmmakers, my advice is simple: protect your voice, refuse to chase trends, and do not give up. The world does not need a replica of what already exists. It needs your specific, uncompromised truth. I often think of something Mira Nair once said, that if we do not tell our own stories, no one else will.

What feels deeply local to you, looked at with honesty, will always find its way to the global stage. Not despite its specificity, but because of it.

Quick Buzz

1. One thing you would put in every film?
– A long, silent scene where characters share a mundane domestic task, peeling vegetables, folding clothes, sitting together as the day fades.

2. A quality you were born with?
– A deep sensitivity toward the people around me.

3. What does Elephants in the Fog mean to you in one line?
– It is the only honest way I knew how to heal.

4. Advice to your younger self?
– Stay. The discomfort is where the truth is.