New Delhi, Sept. 25 -- On paper, Nepal has been a trailblazer on transgender rights. It was the first country to let citizens register their gender by "self feeling", following a 2007 Supreme Court ruling. In 2011, it ran the first national census to count three genders. And in 2023, it became the site of South Asia's first registered same-sex marriage between a trans woman and a gay man, made possible in part by the same third-gender recognition the country had spent over a decade building. Elephants in the Fog, Nepalese filmmaker Abinash Bikram Shah's debut feature, sidesteps that record entirely, settling instead on a Kinnar community that has every legal right to exist and still has to earn, daily, its right to belong.

Elephants in t...