Each night, in a small Nepalese village nestled in a deep forest, the community carries torches between the trees to ward off wild elephants that would otherwise rampage through farmers’ crops. At once a time-honored ritual and a practical responsibility, this custom embodies the complex, often painful collisions between past and present that constitute everyday life in Abinash Bikram Shah’s “Elephants in the Fog.”
Winner of the Un Certain Regard sidebar section’s Jury Prize at Cannes this year, this beautiful, mysterious, and emotionally captivating debut directorial feature is set at the heart of Nepal’s transgender community. The matriarch of a house of transgender refugees living in a traditional Kinnar community—an ancient Nepalese way of living for those who identify as members of the country’s legally respected “third gender,” with religious roots in both Hinduism and Islam—middle-aged trans woman Pirati (Pushpa Thing Lama) has embraced many young trans refugees who live as “daughters” under her roof. Overseen by spiritual gurus, the Kinnar bless weddings and new births for a nearby village from which they are otherwise separated.
Even Pirati chafes against the strict, conservative conditions under which the Kinnar’s hierarchy is structured—including vows of chastity that she’s quietly elected to violate due to her romance with a warm-hearted drummer (Aashant Sharma), who accompanies the Kinnar’s ceremonies, and with whom she dreams of escaping to New Delhi. To Pirati’s adopted daughter Apsara (Aliz Ghimere), a former sex worker who brings rebellious energy to the community, the Kinnar’s historical rigidity—and its belief that trans women should be thought of not as women but as a third gender beyond the binary—is similarly outdated and limiting of the life she wants for herself.
When Apsara vanishes after a quarrel with Pirati, her blonde wig was discovered the next day by children playing in the forest; it is unclear whether she has absconded for parts unknown or if something worse has befallen her. Pirati chooses to look for her lost daughter, contacting friends from Apsara’s past and learning that a married rickshaw driver (Sanja Gupta) had been the one to whom she had expressed an attraction. Soon, the conditional nature of the Kinnar’s acceptance by their neighboring communities comes into focus, as the indifference of police and barely concealed resentment of local villagers complicate Pirati’s increasingly anguished efforts to discover the truth about Apsara’s disappearance.
Evolving—at first almost imperceptibly—from a warm, vibrant examination of everyday Kinnar existence into a tense, nocturnal crime saga, “Elephants in the Fog” emerges as an emotionally kaleidoscopic, immensely ambitious film. Yet even as its story circles the ignorance, prejudice, and violence the trans community faces in South Asia, its lens upon the trans characters at its core is sensitive and revealing. Gracefully, it portrays the solidarity and sisterhood that bind the found families of the Kinnar together without minimizing the fraught nature of their existence in contemporary Nepal, where progressive and reactionary politics remain in flux.
It’s all held together by an extraordinarily moving lead performance by Thing Lama, a Kinnar activist who’d never acted before this film but is riveting in moments of joyous sensuality, as well as in moments when her stoic features are stricken with sorrow. Thing Lama’s eloquent distillation of Pirati’s despair and determination in the face of mounting obstacles, the maternal anguish and desire for justice that slowly burn inside of her, add up to a scorching performance and a truly unforgettable cinematic experience.
Palestinian filmmaker Rakan Mayasi’s lyrical debut feature “Yesterday, the Eye Didn’t Sleep,” also in the Un Certain Regard section, similarly explores what forms of agency remain accessible to women navigating life within larger structures that systematically deprive them of their voices. Set within the patriarchal rituals of Bedouin tribes in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, Mayasi’s film charts intertribal conflict and its consequences for the daughters of one family, even as it is deeply grounded in the close bond between two sisters whose emotional lives are richer than their tradition-bound families can perceive.
Opening with the arresting visual of a truck engulfed in roaring flames, “Yesterday” gradually fills in the context. An enigmatic young woman, Gamra, has fled her family and is assumed to have set the vehicle on fire while making her escape; the truck may have belonged to her lover, who chose another woman. Under cover of darkness, her cousin Yasser (Yasser Al Mawla) searches for her, but his night-time pursuit turns tragic when he accidentally hits and kills a member of the neighboring Bedouin tribe. It is decided that, by way of reparation and in an effort to settle the blood feud, one of his two sisters—the quiet fieldworker Rim (Rim Al Mawla) or outgoing nurse Jawaher (Jawaher Al Mawla)—will be delivered to the aggrieved tribe as an honor offering.
Mayasi’s fascinated by the balance between tradition and modernity in Bedouin tribal life, and he depicts these forces as coexisting in a way that requires the characters—especially the two sisters at the film’s center—to actively negotiate their fates. After Jawaher submits herself to marry one of the rival sheiks’ sons, “Yesterday” shows us their wedding as a celebration where melancholy thrums beneath the merriment, all the bright colors and rhythmic choreography of a traditional ceremony revealing the tribe’s desire for collectivism even as its oppressive customs impose a somber, underlying sense of isolation upon Jawaher and her sister. It’s only through their private conversations—which reveal their own romantic interests and fraught feelings toward their family dynamic—that Rim and Jawaher are able to reconcile the contradictions of their existence. In the periphery of the action, “Yesterday” also occasionally leaves the sounds of war drones buzzing and explosions echoing through the valley, situating the film in a present-day Bekaa Valley beset by repeated Israeli air strikes.
Shot without a script and with a non-professional cast, “Yesterday” treats that overarching story as a starting point, trusting in the familiar instincts of its actors—many of whom are members of the same family—to guide them through scenarios presented by Mayasi’s plot, which he in turn based on accounts of his grandmother’s forced marriage at age 14. That Mayasi studied under Abbas Kiarostami is evidenced by this film’s poetic, neo-realist style, though the improvisational element of its production can make for an occasionally indistinct narrative experience. Even so, the film’s patient attention to landscape and its steady influence on the tribal rituals of its characters also gains texture and potency as “Yesterday” enters a more surrealist, searching final third. There’s an elegant ambiguity to its closing images, involving a pilgrimage through the plains and toward a fertile tree at the base of the mountains, one that reflects the centuries-deep connection between this desert region and its people as, even in contemporary times, a source of spiritual refuge for characters attempting to seize freedom from societal strictures.
Elsewhere in Un Certain Regard, a different sort of rendezvous with past and present—similarly grounded in one woman’s experience struggling to reclaim agency in a society structured upon her subjugation—dominates writer-director Judith Godrèche’s “A Girl’s Story,” which adapts a book of the same name by Nobel Prize-winning French author Annie Ernaux. “It is the absence of meaning in what one lives, at the moment one lives it, which multiplies the possibilities of writing,” Ernaux memorably reflected in this volume, as elegant a précis as any for her richly introspective body of work.
At its best, of course, film can similarly serve as a conduit to one’s personal history, allowing filmmakers to narrativize past experiences and situate them within a greater sociological context. Ernaux’s written work is justly acclaimed for such emotional excavation. In the hands of Godrèche—a French actress and author who also became a key figure in the country’s surging MeToo movement—the film adaptation of “A Girl’s Story” proves remarkably successful in evoking the same liminal space between sensation and memory, between the acuteness of lived experience and the subsequent haze of reminiscence, where Ernaux sets her focus.
“A Girl’s Story,” in which Ernaux revisits the summer of 1958—a formative one in her teenage years that helped to shape her literary identity—was approached by the author as both memoir and reevaluation, allowing her to “explore the gulf between the stupefying reality of things that happen, at the moment they happen, and, years later, the strange unreality in which the things that happened are enveloped.” At the core of Ernaux’s interest was the period when, at seventeen-and-a-half years old and while working as a camp counselor, she was seduced by the head counselor and spent her first night with a man.
This sexual encounter was unhappy and overwhelming, not only in the moment but afterward, as she was forced to reckon with the sting of rejection and subsequent social fallout that left her isolated. At that age, without the emotional framework or feminist vocabulary to recognize what had happened as a set of abuses and manipulations, Ernaux internalized this trauma in ways that—decades later, looking back on her youth through the lens of adulthood—she remained invested in processing fully later in life.
Godrèche’s beautifully burnished film adaptation, starring her daughter Tess Barthélémy as the teenage Ernaux, approaches this chapter in the author’s life with considerable sensitivity but also an unsparing, clear-eyed attention to the power dynamics that dictate life at this summer camp. She does in part by bringing the 70-year-old Ernaux ((Valérie Dréville) into the picture, narrating passages of “A Girl’s Story” aloud at a public event, which allows her to directly frame the younger Annie’s tumultuous experience in the reflective and reconciliatory terms that Ernaux laid out in her book.
A delicate, doe-eyed screen presence, Barthélémy is all too believable as a gangly, guileless young woman who’s desperate to fit in with the other, much more worldly counselors. With her wire-frame spectacles and long skirts, she cuts a demure figure, especially compared to her chic, cigarette-smoking colleagues. This sheltered quality leaves her vulnerable to the older head counselor, Herve (Victor Bonnel), who wastes little time before cornering Annie at a co-ed dance party, kissing her against a wall, then pulling her by the hand toward the dormitories.
The glow of excitement that Barthélémy exudes early in this seduction is partially and poignantly undone by the flashes of fear and confusion in her eyes, as the inexperienced Annie is uneasily reduced to an object for this man’s use but also denied opportunities to seek her own pleasure within the encounter. As word of her dalliance with Herve spreads, she finds herself ostracized from the other girls at camp, even as the boys hungrily circle her to try their luck. And when she endeavors to set more favorable terms for herself with “H.,” as she sometimes dreamily refers to him, the twentysomething callously disregards her, soon altogether discarding his conquest.
Godrèche captures, through rapt attention to Barthélémy’s performance, the deep feelings of betrayal, shame, and humiliation that Annie was left to carry through that long, painful summer. Simultaneously, in the defiance that she discovered within herself, and the increasing (though by no means consistent) confidence with which she learned to defend her corporeal and emotional state from the intrusions of others, Godrèche also assuredly shows us the stirrings of Ernaux’s literary style, the contradiction between molten desire and cool self-examination that makes her prose so electrifying.
Ernaux’s work has been adapted for the screen before; most recently, Audrey Diwan’s second feature, “Happening,” based on Ernaux’s 2000 memoir of the same name, won the Golden Lion at Venice. Godrèche’s film, co-written with her lead actress, will certainly be embraced by those who admired Diwan’s precise, painful distillation of Ernaux’s prose. Whereas that film resonated sharply in our present political moment with its claustrophobically taut chronicling of a university student’s emotionally and physically traumatic efforts to obtain an abortion in 1963 France, prior to its legalization, A Girl’s Story seeks a more gently aching, empathetic embrace of what has always been a universal experience: that of a young woman in the messy, painful process of coming to more deeply understand both herself and the man’s world she must maneuver.
