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.
Yet at the Toronto International Film Festival this month, this quiet film won the Platform Prize, a major juried award 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 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 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 still sounds slightly startled by the award. Speaking in Delhi roughly 72 hours after the win, he said there were many good films in the competition, including those by far more seasoned directors. His producers were confident, he noted, but added: “They thought we were going to win. I wasn’t.”
Before cinema, Rio wanted to be a rapper—“a kid from Compton instead of a kid from Nagaland”, as he puts it. His tastes still range from Black Thought of American hip-hop group The Roots to his favourite filmmaker, 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.