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

ByZoya Mateen BBC News, Delhi. There is something pleasingly improbable regarding Angh.

Key points

• 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.
• Nagaland, which was earlier part of Assam state, formally became an Indian state in December 1963, during a period of profound political and social change.
• And yet, at the Toronto International Film Festival this month, this quiet film won the Platform Prize, a major juried award.
• The win additionally gives Angh an unusual route towards the 2027 Academy Awards.
• As the world around them changes, set in the early 1960s, Angh follows Anghba, the ageing hereditary chief of a Konyak village, and his young son.

For context, the film comes from Nagaland, a mountainous state of fewer than two million individuals on India's northeastern frontier, and is in Konyak, a tribal language unfamiliar to most Indians, never mind audiences abroad. It was director Theja Rio's first feature and most of its cast faced a camera for the first time.

Meanwhile, the award is intended to recognise films with a particularly distinctive directorial voice. The jury praised Rio's "refreshing perspective" and the film's portrait of a world rarely encountered on the international screen.

In practice, the win additionally gives Angh an unusual route towards the 2027 Academy Awards. Under new rules, winners of designated prizes at six international festivals can qualify for consideration in the International Feature Film category without relying solely on their country's official submission.

This does not create Angh an Oscar nominee. But it does place a Konyak-language film from one of India's smallest states inside a global conversation from which such stories have been almost entirely absent.

Rio still sounds slightly startled by it. When we speak in Delhi, roughly 72 hours after the win, he has barely had a moment to breathe – Toronto, flights, interviews, more interviews.

"There were a lot of good films in the competition", he notes, including films by far more seasoned directors. His producers were confident. "They thought we were going to win. I wasn't."

He is additionally less solemn than Angh might suggest. As he puts it, before cinema, he wanted to be a rapper – "a kid from Compton instead of a kid from Nagaland". His tastes still range 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 turned close to home.

As the world around them changes, set in the early 1960s, Angh follows Anghba, the ageing hereditary chief of a Konyak village, and his young son. 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 today, some older men bear facial tattoos associated with the Konyaks' historical practice of headhunting.

Anghba and his son are among the last in their region to hold to an ancestral faith as Christianity spreads.

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

When he was visiting Mon for another project, rio notes the idea for the film came a few years ago. What struck him was how closely different generations seemed to live alongside one another there.

Within a single family, he notes, a grandfather might be a former headhunter, his face still tattooed; two generations afterwards, his grandson might play guitar in a rock band.

"It feels like you've jumped on a time machine, " Rio notes. "The past and the present sort of coexist together."

For context, the year additionally matters. Nagaland, which was earlier part of Assam state, formally became an Indian state in December 1963, during a period of profound political and social change.

By then, Christianity had been spreading among Naga communities for decades, bringing changes extending beyond religious belief into customs, rituals and everyday life.

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

Some practices were lost; others "survived in fragments" – in the memories of elders, in family heirlooms. What had once been part of everyday life became heritage.

But Dr Konyak notes culture did not simply stop. Individuals carried parts of it into new religious and social worlds. Traditions survived, but changed meaning as they changed form. It's this moment of transition that Rio wanted to capture.

"The past 50 or 60 years have brought extraordinary churn, " he notes, widening the distance between generations.

In Angh, he explores this through the relationship between the father and son who "intimately love and care about each other very deeply", even as their worlds commence to pull apart.

Critic Siddhant Adlakha was struck by the ambiguity the film captures. "Progress and tradition can be nonlinear, even entwined, " he notes, "rather than strictly opposing forces."

Notably, the film is yet to reach a wider audience, but its brief trailer offers a glimpse of how Rio constructed this world. Mist hangs over steep green hills; figures move through forests and village paths; fire and lamplight pick faces out of the darkness.

While something larger presses in from beyond its edges, the landscape is beautiful but not merely picturesque – a small world held together by ritual, family and geography.

Adlakha singles out 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 individuals have long been viewed from the outside.

While the lives behind them often receded from view, dr Konyak points to explorers, colonial authorities, missionaries and photographers drawn to tattooed faces, ornaments, weapons and headhunting.

Rio was conscious of inheriting that history. "There have been several films and documentaries made about Nagaland, " he notes, "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".

Meanwhile, the change is subtle but consequential. The Konyaks are no longer an exotic remnant of the past, but individuals 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 was drawn from first-time Konyak performers. The forest, too, belongs to the individuals moving through it. Adlakha notes 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.

While shifting the point of view from outsider to subject, they wanted to recreate the grain, texture and atmosphere of those archival images. It was an evocative choice – and a logistical headache.

Unlike digital footage, the exposed film could not simply be reviewed on set. While the crew carried on shooting without knowing exactly what they had captured, every four or five days, the cans had to be sent to Mumbai for processing. There were more prosaic challenges too.

During a night shoot with Henshall, an old Second World War Jeep was supposed to be driven into frame. It behaved perfectly through rehearsals. But when the cameras began rolling, the engine refused to start. After repeated attempts, the crew managed to capture just one take of the Jeep entering the frame. "It was a very difficult night, " Rio notes.

Angh may be Rio's first feature, but its journey places it within a widening 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 notes, reveals "how complex and multifaceted the idea of Indian cinema happens to be".

Rio thinks Nagaland still remains at the edge of that scene. As he puts it, "at a very nascent stage", with little of the reach enjoyed by India's established filmmaking centres, its film industry is.

But he hopes some of the attention around Angh travels back with it.

In short, from Nagaland to a path to the Oscars: Indian film brings a is the central thread here, and readers can expect follow-up reporting as the picture becomes clearer.