From Nagaland to a path to the Oscars: Indian film brings a rarely seen world to global cinema

**From Nagaland to an Oscar path: an Indian film opens a rarely seen world to global cinema**

There is something wonderfully unlikely about *Angh*.

The film comes from Nagaland, a mountainous state of fewer than two million people on India’s northeastern frontier, and is in Konyak, a tribal language unfamiliar to most Indians, let alone audiences overseas. It was director Theja Rio’s first feature, and most of the cast had never been in front of a camera before.

Even so, at the Toronto International Film Festival this month, the quiet film took home the Platform Prize, a major juried award.

The prize is meant to honour films with a particularly distinctive directorial voice. The jury praised Rio’s “refreshing perspective” and the film’s depiction of a world rarely seen on the international screen.

The victory also gives *Angh* an unusual route toward the 2027 Academy Awards. Under new rules, winners of designated prizes at six international festivals can become eligible for consideration in the International Feature Film category without depending solely on their country’s official submission.

That does not make *Angh* an Oscar nominee. But it does put a Konyak-language film from one of India’s smallest states into a global conversation from which such stories have been almost entirely missing.

Rio still sounds a little stunned by it. When we talk in Delhi, about 72 hours after the win, he has barely had time to catch his breath — Toronto, flights, interviews, more interviews.

“There were a lot of good films in the competition,” he says, including films by far more experienced directors. His producers were sure.

“They thought we were going to win. I wasn’t.”

He is also less serious than *Angh* might imply. Before cinema, he wanted to be a rapper — “a kid from Compton instead of a kid from Nagaland,” as he puts it. His tastes still move happily from Black Thought, the lead rapper of American hip-hop group The Roots, to his favourite filmmaker, the Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami.

But for his first feature, he looked close to home.

Set in the early 1960s, *Angh* follows Anghba, the ageing hereditary chief of a Konyak village, and his young son, as the world around them shifts. The Konyaks are one of Nagaland’s 17 major tribes, concentrated in the eastern district of Mon, where such chiefs are known as Anghs. Even now, some older men still have facial tattoos linked to the Konyaks’ historic practice of headhunting.

Anghba and his son are among the last in their area to remain faithful to an ancestral religion as Christianity spreads.

Then an American missionary, played by Scottish actor Douglas Henshall, arrives. The father resists, but the son becomes curious.

Rio says the idea for the film came a few years ago, when he was in Mon for another project. What stood out to him was how closely different generations seemed to live alongside one another there.

Within one family, he says, a grandfather might be a former headhunter, his face still tattooed; two generations later, his grandson might be playing guitar in a rock band.

“It feels like you’ve jumped on a time machine,” Rio says. “The past and the present sort of coexist together.”

The year matters too. Nagaland, which had earlier been part of Assam state, officially became an Indian state in December 1963, during a period of deep political and social change.

By then, Christianity had been spreading among Naga communities for decades, bringing changes that reached beyond religion into customs, rituals and daily life.

Dr B Amo Konyak, a scholar of Konyak society, says the changes in this period were almost like a disappearance.

Some practices were lost; others “survived in fragments” — in elders’ memories, in family heirlooms. What had once been part of everyday life became heritage.

But Dr Konyak says culture did not simply stop. People carried pieces of it into new religious and social worlds. Traditions survived, but their meaning changed as their form changed.

That moment of transition is what Rio wanted to capture.

“The past 50 or 60 years have brought extraordinary churn,” he says, widening the gap between generations.

In *Angh*, he explores this through the relationship between father and son, who “intimately love and care about each other very deeply”, even as their worlds begin to drift apart.

Critic Siddhant Adlakha was struck by the ambiguity the film conveys. “Progress and tradition can be nonlinear, even entwined,” he says, “rather than strictly opposing forces.”

The film has yet to reach a broad audience, but its short trailer gives a sense of how Rio built this world. Mist hangs over steep green hills; figures move through forests and village paths; fire and lamplight pull faces out of the dark.

The landscape is beautiful, but not simply picturesque — a small world held together by ritual, family and geography, while something larger presses in from beyond its borders.

Adlakha highlights the quiet close-ups of Anghlong Konyak, the first-time actor who plays the chief, and the “gentleness” with which Rio captures his “subdued rage”.

What the camera saw mattered almost as much as where it was looking from.

Konyak people have long been seen from the outside.

Dr Konyak points to explorers, colonial officials, missionaries and photographers drawn to tattooed faces, ornaments, weapons and headhunting, while the lives behind them often faded from view.

Rio was aware of inheriting that history. “There have been several films and documentaries made about Nagaland,” he says, “but these sort of films tend to follow the gaze of the explorer rather than the subject.”

With *Angh*, he wanted to reverse that gaze, asking viewers to “step inside the shoes of these characters”.

The shift is subtle but important. The Konyaks are no longer an exotic remnant of the past, but people living through what Dr Konyak describes as “love, grief, conflict, faith, uncertainty and generational change”.

Konyak advisers worked on dialogue, costume and production design, and much of the cast came from first-time Konyak performers. The forest, too, belongs to the people moving through it. Adlakha says Rio treats it “not just as a setting, but as a home with a history”, much as an urban filmmaker might treat Mumbai or New York.

Rio and cinematographer Adam Pietkiewicz shot *Angh* on 16mm film, drawing on photographs and footage of missionaries and Naga communities from the 1950s and 60s.

They wanted to recreate the grain, texture and mood of those archival images, while shifting the point of view from outsider to subject.

It was an evocative decision — and a logistical nightmare.

Unlike digital footage, the exposed film could not simply be checked on set. Every four or five days, the cans had to be sent to Mumbai for processing, while the crew kept shooting without knowing exactly what they had captured.

There were more ordinary problems too.

During a night shoot with Henshall, an old Second World War Jeep was meant to be driven into frame. It behaved perfectly during rehearsals. But when the cameras started rolling, the engine would not start. After repeated tries, the crew managed to get only one take of the Jeep entering the frame.

“It was a very difficult night,” Rio says.

*Angh* may be Rio’s first feature, but its journey places it within a growing map of Indian cinema, especially in the northeast.

Adlakha points to filmmakers such as Assam’s Rima Das and Meghalaya’s Dominic Sangma whose work, he says, shows “how complex and multifaceted the idea of Indian cinema happens to be”.

Rio believes Nagaland still sits at the edge of that scene. Its film industry is, as he puts it, “at a very nascent stage”, with little of the reach enjoyed by India’s established filmmaking centres.

But he hopes some of the attention around *Angh* will travel back with it.

There are, he says, “so many talented filmmakers with so many beautiful stories that are yet to be told”.

For now, though, Rio is looking forward to something more ordinary — returning to Nagaland.

“I want to play football with my friends.”