From the ind.igenous desk
Back in 2024, I had spoken to Theja and Nancy right after his Tenyidie short film Ade premiered at Rotterdam. Ade, with its delightfully simple yet nuanced storytelling, was like a breath of fresh air, a reminder of home and all that is left behind. At that time, Theja had said something that stayed with me. ‘You know,’ he had said, ‘every time I meet someone new, I’ve had to explain where I come from, because internationally – and even nationally – Nagaland is so underrepresented. There are always raised eyebrows when I tell people that I come from India.’
It was then that they were preparing to begin shooting for Angh, which would be Theja’s first feature film. He had briefly narrated what it would be about, an extension of his 2019 short film of the same name, on the Konyak headhunting tribe in Nagaland – and he would shoot in 16mm. I was excited about this film, eager to watch what he would make.
Yesterday, Angh won the Platform competition at TIFF, which also makes it directly eligible for the International Feature Film category at the 2027 Oscars. Most of Angh’s cast is made up of non-actors from Nagaland (and Douglas Henshall in a key role), and the film is in a language spoken by fewer than a hundred thousand people.
While these are facts that make the win historic, what is important, beyond everything, is to talk about the brilliance of the film itself – especially the mastery in balanced storytelling and the visual treat that it is. Set in a village near the Indo-Burmese border of early 1960s Nagaland, Angh is about Anghba, the last surviving chief of the village, as he tries to protect his family and hold on to his roots, while everyone around him drifts away to convert to Christianity and adapt to a new world brought into their lives by an American missionary.
At its core, Angh weaves a touching father-son tale against the backdrop of an important, and lesser-known period in Naga history. No sides are taken; the new is not pitted against the old. There is no dramatic lament for a lost past, but only a strong reminder that the past existed once. That is where the beauty of Angh lies.
Art, to me, is the strongest medium to get out of our cocooned existences, and to at least attempt to know and understand the lives of others – cultures, human histories, ways of being. ‘The movies are like a machine that generates empathy,’ Roger Ebert had said. A film like Angh makes you empathise with Anghba, his relationship with his family, his fears, the burdensome love for his people that he holds in his heart – and then it makes you go back and Google the Konyak tribe, Naga history, and a world that once was. You now recognize something bigger – bigger than the film you sat down to watch. And that is the power of storytelling, of cinema, of art. May stories bloom from every corner of the world.
