The 31-year-old debutant filmmaker, who explores cultural loss, faith and identity, bringing a little-seen chapter of Naga history to a global audience, shares his story with The Telegraph Online.
When 31-year-old Theja Rio stepped onto the stage at the Toronto International Film Festival to accept the Platform Jury Prize for Angh, he carried with him more than a debut feature. He carried a history that has rarely travelled beyond the hills of Nagaland.
“I come from this small town in India where dreams don’t often come true for my people,” Rio said. “So, thank you for this award. This is just the beginning.”
The film will now automatically travel to the Oscars, competing for Best International Film at the 99th Academy Awards. An astounding feat.
Even now, Rio admits to The Telegraph Online, he is still processing what happened in Toronto. “I am still trying to fully comprehend this victory,” he says. “Initially, I was overwhelmed. My producers were emotional. Nancy [Nisa Beso] was in tears. Gaurav [Dhingra] was so excited he was almost jumping. I’m still quite speechless about it.”
For filmmakers from Nagaland, it’s a breakthrough moment. According to documentary filmmaker Yapangnaro Longkumer, it’s a monumental juncture. “We are a small community trying to find our footing and this gives us more impetus to work harder,” she told The Telegraph Online.
“Theja has captured lightning in a bottle and the filmmakers here are all rooting for him.”
Nagaland to Toronto
The path to Toronto began with Angh, a short film project that grew out of years of Rio’s creative evolution. As a teenager, he wrote songs, rap lyrics, short stories and eventually screenplays before deciding to direct his own work.
With little knowledge of filmmaking, he learned by watching behind-the-scenes footage and working as a runner on commercial shoots.
A breakthrough came in 2015 when a script of his was selected for a workshop in Sicily, where he made his first short film. The Italian experience strengthened his resolve to tell stories from Nagaland and the northeast, a region he felt had long been underrepresented on screen.
Angh itself started as a short film and enjoyed a successful festival run. Yet Rio always believed the story demanded a larger canvas. “Even then I knew I had a feature film in my hands because it was such a complex story,” he said.
That short later helped him secure a place at the UK’s National Film and Television School.
An admirer of filmmakers Abbas Kiarostami and Satyajit Ray, Rio is often drawn to stories that leave him conflicted. He believes uncertainty can produce richer, more nuanced cinema. “If you’re completely sure about a subject, there’s always the risk of it becoming agenda-driven,” he said.
How Angh happened
The seed for Angh was planted in 2016 while Rio was travelling through Nagaland’s Mon district for a different project. There, he encountered the striking image of a former headhunter from the Konyak tribe dressed in formal western clothing, a symbol of displacement, cultural collision and loss that stayed with him.
Multiple visits to the region, conversations with elders and the making of a short documentary eventually led to the idea for Angh.
Set in a remote Konyak village along the India-Myanmar border in the 1960s, Angh unfolds during a turbulent period in Nagaland’s history. Home to at least 16 tribes, the northeastern Indian state was formally established only in 1963. Yet rather than focusing on the region’s political conflict, Rio turns his attention to a more intimate upheaval: the encounter between Christianity and indigenous traditions.
The title, Angh, means “chief”. The film follows a Konyak chief, his son and an American Baptist missionary who arrives bearing gifts, education and a new belief system.
As the missionary’s influence spreads, the chief watches the world he has inherited slowly recede, captured memorably in a haunting image of a cross rising above the village. The result is a deeply personal meditation on cultural survival, generational change and the costs of modernity.
For Rio, the 1960s provided the ideal setting because old and new worlds still coexisted. Traditional Konyak practices, including headhunting, had not entirely disappeared, while Christianity and modern influences were rapidly reshaping Naga society, creating sharp divides between generations.
“The Nagas have experienced one of the most remarkable cultural transitions imaginable,” Rio said. “Within just two generations, a single family can span vastly different worlds: a grandfather or great-grandfather who wore traditional facial tattoos and once lived as a headhunter, and a grandson who plays guitar in a rock band.”
Creating a Konyak Set, filming inside a jungle
Speaking to The Telegraph Online, Rio reflected on the extraordinary challenges of bringing Angh to life. Filming deep in Nagaland’s forests proved to be a logistical undertaking unlike anything a first-time filmmaker could have imagined.
“The whole thing was a logistical nightmare. There were so many times during production where I felt like I was shooting myself in the foot with every decision I was making,” he said.
One of the biggest hurdles was accommodating a crew of nearly 150 people. The remote location could not support such a large production unit, forcing many crew members to travel back and forth from Dimapur throughout the shoot.
The production also required the recreation of an entire Konyak village in the jungle in Ghaspani. To ensure authenticity, members of the Konyak community were brought in to construct traditional houses based on their own knowledge and lived experience.
The filmmakers supplemented this with extensive research, drawing on the ethnographic works of Hans-Eberhard Kauffmann and Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf.
At times, Rio says, making Angh felt as much like an expedition as a film production. Many members of the crew were unfamiliar with the region’s rugged terrain, yet they spent weeks hauling equipment up steep mountain paths in Puliebadze and working in unpredictable weather conditions.
“It’s not the easiest climb, you know. Then you’re shooting right at the beginning of the monsoon. You’re dealing with landslides, wind and rain. And you’re working with actors who are mostly barefoot and minimally clothed, constantly moving through the forest. None of it was easy at all.”
Looking back, Rio described himself as fortunate to have been surrounded by an exceptionally dedicated team.
‘Whatever we were shooting, we would only see seven days later’
The decision to shoot Angh on 16mm analogue film only added to the production’s complexity. With no facilities in Nagaland to process the footage, exposed film reels had to be sent regularly to Mumbai for development and scanning.
“Every four days, we had to send two people with the film stock from Dimapur to Bombay by train,” Rio recalled. “It was a three-day journey. They would process the footage, scan it, and then send it back to us. That was the whole system.”
The arrangement meant that neither Rio nor his crew could immediately review what they had shot.
“Whatever we were shooting, we would only see seven days later,” he said. “My cinematographer was sleepless. But he’s very happy with the decision now. We had to put a lot of trust in what we were shooting.”
That leap of faith paid off. Cinematographer Adam Pietkiewicz used 16mm film stock alongside natural light to create a grainy, organic visual language that mirrors the film’s themes of memory, tradition and cultural transition.
The texture of the image becomes part of the film’s DNA, evoking a world suspended between past and present, struggling to survive on its own terms.
Yet what gives Angh its urgency is its refusal to remain safely in the past.
Former television director and producer V. Ate Kevichusa believes “Theja’s win has given young Nagas hope that their future can be better if they get up, brush themselves off, and work towards achieving their dreams, however modest or lofty.”
Just 10 days before Rio received the Platform Prize in Toronto, Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum announced the return of 39 colonial-era Naga ancestral remains to communities in Nagaland and Myanmar.
The homecoming marked a significant moment in the region’s ongoing reckoning with colonial histories.
In its own way, Angh participates in that same act of cultural recovery, reclaiming and preserving stories that have long existed on the margins.
Rio, however, is already looking ahead. His 2024 graduation film was a postcolonial horror story centred on a Windrush migrant employed to care for a British estate and its collection of colonial artefacts, only to discover that he himself has become part of the collection’s most prized possessions.
“My graduation film is a post-colonial horror film called Remains,” Rio said.
There are other projects waiting too, including a Kiarostami-inspired coming-of-age story titled Ade on a Weekend. For now, all eyes are on a Konyak village in the 1960s and the young Naga filmmaker who has brought it vividly to life on the world stage.
source/content: telegraphindia.com (headline edited)