‘Angh’ Review: Toronto’s Platform Award Winner Is a Lush Lament for an Indian Tribe in the 1960s
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Director Theja Rio's debut feature "Angh" has won the top prize in the Platform competition at the Toronto Film Festival, qualifying it for Best International Feature Oscar consideration. The film explores the tension between indigenous identity and colonial modernity through the story of a Konyak tribal chief in 1960s Nagaland, as an American missionary's arrival threatens the tribe's traditional way of life.
The narrative follows Chief Anghba and his son Amao in eastern India's Nagaland state, bordering Burma, as they resist the encroachment of Christian missionaries and the allure of Western culture. Shot on 16mm film with a cast primarily comprising non-professional tribal actors, Rio crafts a visually immersive atmosphere that subverts traditional colonial perspectives in cinema. The film employs dreamlike sequences and phantasmagoria to underscore the chief's grief over the loss of language, ritual, attire and collective memory, ultimately presenting itself as a quiet memorial to the disappearance of indigenous ways of life in the face of external progress.
- Toronto Film Festival Platform prize winner qualifying for Best International Feature Oscar nomination
- 1960s Nagaland drama following tribal chief resisting missionary and colonial cultural encroachment
- Artistic meditation on loss of indigenous identity, language, ritual and memory systems
Full account
Theja Rio’s debut feature, “Angh”, is set in 1960s Nagaland, in north-east India, and follows Anghba, an ageing Konyak chief, and his son Amao. They are portrayed as among the last members of their community to remain attached to ancestral practices while neighbouring villagers adopt Baptist Christianity and the social patterns accompanying it. The film expands on Rio’s 2021 short and places the private grief of a father and son within a wider account of cultural change.
The story begins after the death of Anghba’s wife, leaving him and Amao isolated in the forested landscape. Amao’s interest in western clothes and in the converted community nearby creates a growing divide between him and his father. Their situation is further altered by the arrival of an American missionary, played by Douglas Henshall, whose medical help and religious message are presented as intertwined. Rio’s film examines the pressures of change without reducing them solely to overt coercion.
Its approach is notably sensory and elliptical. Shot on 16mm by Adam Pietkiewicz, the film uses the grain, marks and instability of celluloid to make the natural environment feel animate. Dreams and visions increasingly shape the narrative, while rituals that might conventionally be framed as exotic or violent are treated from within the Konyak world. Anghlong Konyak, supported by a cast largely drawn from indigenous Naga communities, anchors the film as a leader struggling to safeguard language, dress, memory and ceremony.
“Angh” won the Platform competition’s top award at the Toronto International Film Festival. The recognition brought international attention to a film whose concerns remain deliberately local: a changing village, a fragile father-son relationship and the consequences of treating modernisation as inevitable. Rio has described the project as being about home, loss, letting go and life’s impermanence, while producer Nancy Nisa Beso said its progression from short film to feature had been sustained by a commitment to tell the story on its own terms.
Where outlets differ
Source 1 is principally a critical review, stressing the film’s dreamlike form, 16mm imagery, anti-colonial perspective and Anghba’s emotional resistance to cultural loss. Source 2 focuses more on the Toronto award, Oscar-race implications, production history, industry representation and statements from Rio and the producers.
Source 2 says the Platform prize gives the film automatic entry to the 2027 International Feature Oscar race and contrasts it with India’s official submission, “Gondhal”; Source 1 instead concentrates on the film’s artistic qualities and narrative world.
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