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Watch: Indian film brings a rarely seen world to global cinema
There is something pleasingly improbable 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, never mind audiences abroad. It was director Theja Rio's first feature and most of its cast faced a camera for the first time.
And yet, at the Toronto International Film Festival this month, this quiet film won the Platform Prize, a major juried award.
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.
The win also 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 make 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 says, including films by far more seasoned directors. His producers were confident.
"They thought we were going to win. I wasn't."
He is also less solemn than Angh might suggest. 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 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.
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 changes. 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.
Image source, George PimentelImage caption, Anghba is the ageing hereditary chief of a Konyak village in Nagaland in the film
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.
Rio says the idea for the film came a few years ago, when he was visiting Mon for another project. What struck him was how closely different generations seemed to live alongside one another there.
Within a single family, he says, a grandfather might be a former headhunter, his face still tattooed; two generations later, his grandson might play 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 also 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.
Image source, George PimentelImage caption, From right: Theja Rio poses with Nancy Nisa Beso, the film's producer, and actors Anglong Konyak (who plays the village chief, Anghba) and Sobino Rengma (who plays the son, Amao)
Dr B Amo Konyak, a scholar of Konyak society, says 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 says culture did not simply stop. People 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 says, 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 begin to pull apart.
Critic Siddhant Adlakha was struck by the ambiguity the film captures. "Progress and tradition can be nonlinear, even entwined," he says, "rather than strictly opposing forces."
Image source, George PimentelImage caption, Angh traces the relationship between a father and son as they reconcile with larger changes
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.
The landscape is beautiful but not merely picturesque - a small world held together by ritual, family and geography, while something larger presses in from beyond its edges.
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 people have long been viewed 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 receded from view.
Image source, George PimentelImage caption, The forest plays a central part in the storytelling of the film
Rio was conscious 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 change is subtle but consequential. 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 was drawn 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 atmosphere of those archival images, while shifting the point of view from outsider to subject.
It was an evocative choice - and a logistical headache.
Unlike digital footage, the exposed film could not simply be reviewed on set. Every four or five days, the cans had to be sent to Mumbai for processing, while the crew carried on shooting without knowing exactly what they had captured.
Image source, George PimentelImage caption, The film also stars Sottish actor Douglas Henshall, who plays a Christian missionary
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 says.
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 says, reveals "how complex and multifaceted the idea of Indian cinema happens to be".
Rio thinks Nagaland still remains 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 travels 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 - getting back to Nagaland.
"I want to play football with my friends."
