ELEPHANTS IN THE FOG announces itself first through sound. The screen remains dark. What arrives is chanting from villagers patrolling the edge of their settlement, a collective rhythm to guard against fear. “It is a collective scream transformed into a vocal rhythm, used to maintain their composure,” the director, Abinash Bikram Shah, told me. “They are all deeply terrified, and it is through this shared screaming that they summon their courage.” The chant is built from a traditional Nepali bhajan, or devotional song, its words arranged to turn a cry of fear into “a shield of sound”. This opening composition sets the tone for the composer Frédéric Alvarez’s score throughout the film, which returns again and again to the line between human voice and instrument, rarely letting either dominate.
The cinematographer, Noé Bach, captures the forested village in Thori, in the Terai plains of southern Nepal, in its quietest register: fog-laden winter afternoons and evenings, the light flat and grey, the jungle never quite letting the eye settle. It is a landscape shot less for spectacle than for atmosphere, the fog doing as much narrative work as any line of dialogue.
Slowly, shapes emerge. Villagers with torches and flares try to scare away elephants entering from the forest, the same animal they worship. Across Nepal, as well as much of India and Southasia, the elephant represents the deity Ganesha, remover of obstacles and patron of the arts and sciences, his idols and images present in almost every Hindu home. In the Terai, this same animal is jolted by electrified fences, driven away and sometimes killed by people desperate to protect their fields and homes from its intrusions. Shah lingers on one striking image: massive red eyes painted onto tree trunks at the forest’s edge, another of the measures the villagers deploy to try and repel the elephants.