Nagaland's 'Angh' wins Toronto prize, charts rare path to Oscar consideration

Theja Rio was still catching his breath. Seventy-two hours after his film won the Platform Prize at the Toronto International Film Festival, he sat in Delhi trying to process what had happened—a major international jury award for a debut feature shot in Konyak, a tribal language spoken by fewer than 200,000 people, in a mountainous state of northeastern India with a population under two million. Most of the cast had never stood in front of a camera before. Rio himself had wanted to be a rapper. And yet here was Angh, a quiet film about a Konyak village chief and his son in the early 1960s, suddenly positioned on a path toward the 2027 Academy Awards.

The improbability was not lost on Rio. "There were a lot of good films in the competition," he said, "including films by far more seasoned directors." His producers had believed in a win. He had not. The Toronto jury praised his "refreshing perspective" and the film's portrait of a world rarely seen on international screens. But what made the win consequential was not just the prize itself—it was the new rules. Under revised Academy guidelines, winners of designated prizes at six international festivals can now qualify for consideration in the International Feature Film category without depending entirely on their country's official submission. This does not guarantee Angh an Oscar nomination. It does something perhaps more significant: it places 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 had come to the story through geography and observation. A few years earlier, while visiting Mon district—the eastern region where Konyak people are concentrated—for another project, he noticed something that struck him: how different generations seemed to inhabit the same space, living alongside one another as if time itself had fractured. A grandfather might bear the facial tattoos of a former headhunter; his grandson might play guitar in a rock band. "It feels like you've jumped on a time machine," Rio said. "The past and the present sort of coexist together." He decided to build a film around that collision, setting it in the early 1960s, when Nagaland formally became an Indian state and Christianity was spreading rapidly through Konyak communities, reshaping customs, rituals, and daily life. The film follows Anghba, an aging hereditary chief, and his young son as the world around them transforms. An American missionary, played by Scottish actor Douglas Henshall, arrives. The father resists. The son grows curious.

Dr. B Amo Konyak, a scholar of Konyak society, described the period as almost a disappearance. Some practices were lost entirely; others "survived in fragments"—in the memories of elders, in family heirlooms, in objects that had once been ordinary and became heritage. But culture did not simply vanish. People carried parts of it into new religious and social worlds. Traditions survived, but their meaning shifted as their form changed. Rio wanted to capture that precise moment of transition, the intimacy between father and son even as their worlds began to pull apart. Critic Siddhant Adlakha noted the film's refusal of easy binaries: "Progress and tradition can be nonlinear, even entwined, rather than strictly opposing forces."

What distinguished Rio's approach was a deliberate reversal of perspective. Konyak people have long been viewed from outside—through the eyes of explorers, colonial officials, missionaries, and photographers drawn to tattooed faces, ornaments, and the historical practice of headhunting, while the lives behind those images receded from view. Rio was conscious of inheriting that history. "There have been several films and documentaries made about Nagaland," he said, "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 entirely, asking viewers to step inside the shoes of these characters. Konyak advisers worked on dialogue, costume, and production design. Much of the cast came from first-time Konyak performers. The forest itself was treated not as exotic backdrop but as home with a history—the way an urban filmmaker might treat Mumbai or New York.

Rio and cinematographer Adam Pietkiewicz shot 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 nightmare. Unlike digital footage, exposed film could not 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 blind, not knowing exactly what they had captured. During one night shoot with Henshall, an old Second World War Jeep was supposed to be driven into frame. It performed perfectly through rehearsals. When cameras rolled, the engine refused to start. After repeated attempts, they managed to capture just one usable take. "It was a very difficult night," Rio said.

The win at Toronto signals something larger about Indian cinema. Filmmakers like Assam's Rima Das and Meghalaya's Dominic Sangma have been revealing how complex and multifaceted the idea of Indian cinema actually is, yet Nagaland remains at the edge of that scene. Its film industry is, as Rio put it, "at a very nascent stage," with little of the reach enjoyed by India's established filmmaking centers. But Rio hopes attention around Angh travels back with it. "There are so many talented filmmakers with so many beautiful stories that are yet to be told," he said. For now, though, he was thinking of something simpler: getting home to Nagaland and playing football with his friends.