Like the community of transgender women at its center, Nepalese drama “Elephants in the Fog” is gentle, fierce, and full of life and contradictions. Making his feature debut, writer-director Abinash Bikram Shah zeroes in on the transactional nature of trans acceptance in South Asia, a fragile prospect he explores through an authentically cast tale of […]

Bound by a common language and torrid history, 21-year-old Mexican nanny Lucila (Anna Diaz) bristles against her surroundings in Madrid, where she and her younger brother followed their mother from their Mexican hometown. “Ashes” shares these broad strokes with the novel on which it’s based — Brenda Navarro’s evocatively titled “Ceniza en la boca,” or […]

A coming-of-age drama that gradually turns morose, Blerta Basholli’s sophomore feature “Dua” follows up her Sundance-winning 2021 debut “Hive” as a reflection of Kosovan women in the late 1990s. This time, however, the director draws from her own experiences as a girl who came of age in the shadow of the Kosovo War. The conflict […]