When Angh, a film set in a remote corner of north-east India rarely depicted on screen, won the Platform Prize at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, it made history in more ways than one.
The debut feature by 31-year-old Naga filmmaker Theja Rio became the first Indian film to win the prestigious award, earning a place in the race for Best International Feature Film at the 2027 Academy Awards. Thanks to a change in Oscar eligibility rules, the victory means Angh can compete for consideration independently of India's official submission, the Marathi-language film Gondhal.
Told primarily in Konyak, the language of one of Nagaland's many indigenous Naga tribes, the film explores the tension between ancestral traditions and the arrival of Christianity in the region in the 1960s.
For Rio, the international recognition is particularly meaningful.
“Growing up, I've never seen Nagaland in a film before or in a series before,” he tells The National. “And very often, every time you introduce yourself, you're getting into the backdrops of where you come from and then you're having to describe geographically where exactly it is.”
Rio first explored the story in a short film in 2019, inspired by a visit to Nagaland's Mon district three years earlier. But he soon realised that the characters and the cultural transformations he wanted to explore needed more room to develop, prompting him to expand the story into his first feature.
The response since the Toronto victory has exceeded his expectations, he says. Rio returned to Nagaland last month to celebrations and messages of pride, while the film has attracted attention from across India and beyond.
“It's been a fever dream,” he says. “It's just my debut feature and it's yet to release, but to receive the reactions we have received and the fact that anyone is interested in having to hear what I have to say is completely baffling, but something that I'm very grateful about.
“And just being able to make our people feel represented is by far the most heartwarming thing.”
It is a fitting response to a film concerned with identity and belonging, and with what happens when the world around a community changes faster than its people can adapt.
Between the past and present
Set in Nagaland in the early 1960s, Angh follows Anghba (played by Anghlong Konyak), an ageing Konyak village chief, and his son as they confront the arrival of a Christian missionary and the changes it brings to their traditional way of life.
The story is not simply about the clash between two belief systems. It explores the uncertainty of people caught between generations, as familiar customs begin to disappear and new ideas reshape their understanding of the world.
During his journey to Mon, a district in eastern Nagaland bordering Myanmar, Rio encountered elderly Konyak men with traditional facial tattoos whose appearances reflected a way of life that had largely disappeared.
“Mon is a very interesting place in the sense that they still have a lot of the practices and a lot of the structures from their older traditions that is still exist, while at the same time, like the rest of Nagaland, it has also become very modern in a sense,” he explains. “There were a lot of the tattooed faces but they were all dressed in modern clothes.”
The contrast fascinated him. Here were people whose faces carried the visible history of an earlier generation, yet who were living in a world transformed by religion, education and modernity.
The encounter also connected with Rio's long-standing fascination with characters whose lives have been overtaken by history.
“I wanted to make a film about those people who have gone through that phase of rapid transition in the 60s and the 70s,” he says. “I'm very interested and very passionate about characters that have been sort of left behind by time. There's something very tragic and melancholic about characters like that.”
It was the combination of these two ideas – a community experiencing profound change and a character struggling to hold on to an older world – that eventually became Angh.
The complexities of change
The relationship between Christianity and indigenous Naga traditions is not merely a subject from the past, it's a question that touches Rio's own identity.
Christianity is now deeply embedded in much of Nagaland's society, but its spread also coincided with the decline of ancestral beliefs and practices. Exploring that history can be sensitive, particularly when it involves examining the consequences of missionary activity.
Rio, who is Christian, was determined not to portray either side as entirely right or wrong.
“It was very important to not antagonise any side,” he says. “I see both sides of it, and that's why I feel all my characters have a lot of depth. They're not one-dimensional characters who are almost caricature like. They're not there to play a villain or there just to be the opposition of the other.”
That approach shapes the relationship between the village chief and the missionary, played by Scottish actor Douglas Henshall.
“When you watch the film, you'll realise that the white priest comes with the best intention, but from Anghba's perspective, he poses a threat to the community and to the culture that he is trying to hold on to.
“That's one of the reasons why I like to make films about things that I'm conflicted about rather than make films about things that I'm sure about, which is dangerously treading the propaganda line.”
But how did a story so deeply rooted in Nagaland's history and culture strike a chord with an international jury at one of the world's biggest film festivals?
At the Toronto International Film Festival, jury members praised Angh “for its refreshing perspective, strength of filmmaking and deeply resonant portrait of a world”.
“We praise the filmmaker’s vision, audacity and courage,” they said.
For Rio, the film's universal appeal lies in its themes of rapid change and cultural preservation.
“The film is something that is obviously very culturally specific, but thematically something that is very universal,” he says. “We're living in a time where we're dealing with great change happening at a rapid speed than it's ever been. So in that sense, it's quite topical as well.
“There's also so much conversation about conservation of, not just the environment, but of culture. So I think the film is very topical in that sense.”
Bringing Angh to life
When Rio was developing Angh as a short film in 2019, he had already realised the characters and their conflicts required a larger canvas.
“I was struggling to compress the entire thing into a short film, and I knew it was always meant to be a feature. The characters, the conflict, it's just too big to be restricted into a short film format,” he says.
At the time, however, he lacked the experience and resources to make a full-length production. The short film's positive reception on the festival circuit encouraged him to expand the screenplay.
He subsequently studied at the National Film and Television School in the UK, where working on other projects gave him time away from the story.
When he returned to it, he had gained experience and a new perspective on the material.
Supporting him through much of that journey has been Nancy Nisa Beso, a long-time film producer whose career spans more than two decades across documentary, commercial and independent filmmaking.
Beso has known Rio since childhood and has worked with him on several projects, including the original short film. The success of Angh is the culmination of years of dedication rather than an overnight breakthrough, she says.
“Technically, while this is his first feature film, he has been working on films for the last 11 years of his life,” she says. “This is a product of 11 years of just working towards your skill and expanding what you built.”
The feature presented numerous challenges, particularly when it came to casting. With few professional actors available locally, Rio and his team travelled through villages in the Mon region searching for people who could convincingly portray the characters.
“We had no option but to cast non-actors because we don't have professional actors where we come from, so it wasn't necessarily a choice,” Rio says.
The lead role eventually went to Konyak, a stand-up comedian Rio discovered on YouTube after struggling to find someone with the necessary screen presence.
Rio's decision to shoot on 16mm film, despite its many logistical challenges, was equally deliberate. He had been influenced by archival photographs and footage of the region taken during the early years of missionary activity.
“There's something about film that is so filled with nostalgia. Obviously, I wasn't around in the 60s. But it's something that has a texture that's so atmospheric and so mystique,” he says.
The project also received backing from the Red Sea Fund, an initiative of Saudi Arabia's Red Sea International Film Festival supporting filmmakers from the Arab world, Africa and Asia.
Road to the Oscars
But making history at Toronto was one thing. Now comes the challenge of turning that victory into an Oscar nomination.
For Rio and his team, the coming months will be a whirlwind of screenings, meetings with Academy voters, networking and fund-raising. The film's Platform Prize win has opened the door to consideration for Best International Feature Film, but securing a place on the shortlist, let alone among the final five nominees, will require an entirely different kind of effort.
Preliminary voting for the Oscars' Best International Feature Film will take place from December 7 to 11, with the shortlist announced on December 15. Nominations voting will run from January 11 to 15, with the final five nominees for the category announced alongside the other Oscar nominations on January 21.
Producer Beso is preparing for a campaign that will take the filmmakers from India to Britain and the US, with Los Angeles and New York becoming key stops.
“The plan is to move to LA very soon, but we are also in the meantime trying to get all the Academy members to watch the film, whether it's in India or in the UK and in the US,” she says. “The next few months are very exciting, but it's also like a marathon.
“Every day there is lobbying and interviews. I usually say a producer's job is to beg, borrow and steal. So right now I'm in the begging stage.
“It's expensive to make a film, but it's even more expensive to do that entire campaign.”
For Rio, who has already experienced a remarkable few weeks since Toronto, the prospect of navigating Hollywood's awards circuit is another unfamiliar chapter.
“I don't know what I'm getting into, but I'm looking forward to it,” he says.