Angh comes from a point of internal conflict for myself: TIFF award-winning filmmaker Theja Rio

In a Wknd interview, the 31-year-old, whose film is now eligible for the Oscars, talks about cultural shock, uprootedness, and his love for Nagaland.

Tribal chiefs fighting to safeguard ancient ways of life often have a heavy cross to bear.

In Angh (Konyak for Chief), the protagonist is one such leader. He knows the ways of the forest, and how it has provided for his tribe. But now it is the 1960s. Christianity has arrived, in the form of a foreign missionary. This man’s way of life offers comfort and ease. As the tribal hamlet empties out, Anghba starts to realise he may not be able to compete with that.

This thoughtful meditation on loss, faith and transition was written and directed by Theja Rio, 31.

Last week, it became the first film from Nagaland to feature at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). It premiered there, and was in competition in the Platform section (for best film in a non-English language). Starting this year, the winner of the Platform Prize becomes automatically eligible for the Best International Feature Oscar too.

And this time, that’s Angh. The jury statement lauded its “refreshing perspective, strength of filmmaking, and deeply resonant portrait of a world”; it praised “the filmmaker’s vision, audacity and courage.”

Anghlong Konyak is masterful as Anghba, the tribal chief fighting a losing battle, as a new faith leads his people into a new life.

“It’s a story with a wide view on changing communities and the effect of missionaries and kind of small-scale colonisation in that one community,” says Platform lead and TIFF director of programming Robyn Citizen. “There’s this very intimate father-son story as well. So it was working on several different levels for us in terms of story, and was helped quite a bit by the striking cinematography.” (More on this in a bit.)

In his acceptance speech, he dedicated the win to the people of his state.

“I come from a small town in the north-east of India, where dreams don’t often come true for my people. So, if I may, I would like to dedicate this award to everyone back home,” he said.

***

Born and raised in Kohima, the state’s capital, Rio moved to Delhi as a schoolboy, graduated in English literature, then earned a Master’s degree in direction at the UK’s National Film and Television School.

He began his career with shorts set in Nagaland that were critically well-received, including a short-film version of Angh (2021). The idea for the story came to him during a trip to the remote district of Mon.

It felt “a bit like a time machine,” Rio says. “Like the past and the present were sort of coexisting.” Villagers held on to traditions such as face tattoos, which to a Naga city boy, he says, felt like “cultural shock.”

It was then that he realised the full import of what had been lost, as evangelists displaced traditional animist faiths.

Rio made his short film, but felt there was a lot more of the story to be told. He decided to turn it into his debut feature.

“Even when I was making the short, I knew it was supposed to be a feature,” he says. He completed the script in 2024. And then he began filming.

“I think Angh comes from a point of internal conflict for myself,” says Rio. He was born and raised in a community where the church holds a central place, he adds. But it began to strike him that “we have been deracinated or uprooted culturally in our faith as well.”

Anghlong Konyak is masterful as Anghba, a stoic father and tribal chief growing increasingly desperate, and isolated. Sobino Rengma, as his mute son Amao, manages to wordlessly convey loneliness, confusion, pain and conflict. The Scottish actor Douglas Henshall (Shetland; Primeval) is subtle and understated, as the missionary.

The themes weren’t easy to navigate. He and his crew worked closely with the Konyak community, to ensure they reflected the culture of the tribe truthfully. They worked to render the missionary as realistically as possible too.

The film strives to be honest and seeks a neutral perspective, Rio says, though it does show “how the arrival of one thing is responsible for the death of another.”

(Read the full interview in this week’s HT Wknd, on Sunday)