Indian Cinema At A Crossroads: In Conversation With The Makers Of ‘Angh’

Nearly a month after winning the Platform award at the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), earning a direct pathway to the Oscars 2027, Theja Rio is still doing interviews. The novelty has faded, he says, but not the gratitude. “It’s been a fever dream, the whole thing,” he says of the weeks since 'Angh' won when we speak earlier this month. The film’s success has been mercurial, and he and producer Nancy Beso are determined not to waste the momentum. “We’re happy, we’re grateful, and we’re trying to make full use of the visibility and the opportunity we’ve received,” they say.

The conversation takes place in fragments. Rio is in Delhi, where patchy internet due to the ongoing protests keeps cutting him off mid-answer. Beso steps away to call someone at the office, then returns to carry on. It is a small, almost ironic reminder of how far this film has travelled, and how much of that journey was made on improvisations.

Angh is Rio’s first feature, and it has landed him in the thick of Oscar buzz. For Beso, that means a new phase of work. “There is a very challenging journey ahead of us, which is the Oscar journey,” she says. Each morning brings congratulatory messages on Instagram, and each day brings a new logistical problem to solve. The support, she says, is real: “there will always be love out for you out there.”

Rio appears more guarded. He says he still wants to make “the films that I want to do”, and calls the whole run a blessing. “I’m well aware that it’s been a blessing and I’m very grateful for that,” he says. “This might not happen again for the rest of my life.” His priority is not to let the attention reshape his voice. He admits he has no map for the award circuit. “This is my first film,” he says. “I have no idea what we’re doing.”

His candour is, in equal measure, surprising and disarming. It also hints at a quality the film’s admirers keep returning to, an unforced sense of belonging to its own world. He says he wants to “maintain this voice, the artistic voice and stay true and stay organic to that.” Rio’s films return, again and again, to a few preoccupations: Angh and his short 'Ade' both turn on religion and on the relationships between fathers and sons. In Angh, the rupture that came to Naga society with Christianity and proselytising is the spine of the film. In Ade, church-going family life sits in the background.

He is wary of over-explaining himself. It took someone at film school to point out the pattern, he says. “I never really realised.” He distrusts over-analysis, too. “I don’t like to psycho-analyse my films or my thought process around films too much,” he says, since too much awareness can seep into the creative process. But the logic, to him, is plain. Growing up in Nagaland, religion is part of the atmosphere, and so is generational conflict.

“The generational gap in Naga society is very big,” Rio says. “A lot of our grandparents don’t speak the English language, for example.” Their children’s generation, by contrast, “grew up listening to bands like Beatles, Dire Straits.” The distance between those generations, he suggests, may be wider than almost anywhere else, and the fault lines in father-son relationships run along it. What draws him to these subjects, he says, is simply where he is from. “Where you come from shapes who you are,” he says. “It definitely does affect who you are as an artist.”

The more surprising turn in Rio’s body of work comes with ‘Remains’, his graduation film, inspired by the curious case of Naga remains in the University of Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum. The film follows the afterlife of ancestral Naga remains in an English old man’s private collection. Its protagonist is a Windrush-era Caribbean immigrant, and Rio explains the choice by describing two registers in his work. “The films that I make that are set in Nagaland are far more grounded and rooted,” he says. Films made elsewhere become “a lot more surreal,” because he does not know those worlds as intimately. "Remains came from research and “more intellectual conversations,” he says.

He considered making the lead a Naga or Indian character, but “it just felt too inorganic”. The ghost, however, fit within the story naturally: “the idea of the ghost really felt like it belonged there”. The spirit, and “the remains or the artefacts of Nagaland," could plausibly be present in that setting. The 1960s setting made sense because many Windrush immigrants were arriving from the Caribbean.

The film, he says, is about colonialism, and about how its violence nonetheless left people from different corners of the world with a shared history. He wanted to bring together “how they’ve been able to find that commonality under the violence of colonialism”.

Angh arrives at a moment when films from India’s Northeast frontier are drawing attention on the international circuit. Rima Das’s ‘Village Rockstars’ and ‘Not a Hero’, Tribeny Rai’s ‘Shape of Momo’ and ‘A Chronicle of Minor Things’, and a growing number of small, hyper-local productions have found appreciative juries and audiences abroad. Why is this happening now?

Beso rejects the notion that this is a sudden phenomenon. Assamese and Manipuri cinema, she points out, have made waves in the national circuit and at festivals for decades. What has changed is who is watching. Filmmakers from Meghalaya, Sikkim, Tripura and Arunachal Pradesh are now reaching major festivals and winning, and some are part of the Asian Project Market at Busan. Visibility, in her telling, is only now catching up with the work: “the visibility for those films is just coming up now.”

Her explanation for the resonance is straightforward. Many of these films are financed by the filmmakers themselves or by private investors who aren’t primarily motivated by a film’s commercial value, so “they’re not trying to please anybody”. Their settings may be rural and specific, but “the issues they deal with are often very global”. Ladakh, she points out, is producing work that travels, too. Her formula is simple: “to stay true to who you are, to make great stories, to set it very locally, but, you know, still be able to speak the global language.”

It is an argument worth taking seriously, because it reverses the usual anxiety about regional cinema, that specificity limits reach. The festival circuit, hungry for voices that feel unmediated by market expectations, has often rewarded exactly the opposite instinct.

But getting to festival is one part of the journey, Beso says. Filmmakers do not make films for programmers and the occasional critic invited to a screening. They make them so that audiences can see them, and that requires a release in a theatre or on a platform.

Her frustration is aimed at the Indian industry’s categories. Regional cinema, she argues, cannot keep meaning only the cinema of a few well-established languages. “India must look at films from the East. India must look at films from the North and identify them as regional cinemas that have an audience.” If festivals around the world are giving these films accolades, she asks, why is the home market not paying attention? She points to Korean cinema, which does well in India even though few viewers understand the language, because somebody brought the films in and supplied subtitles. “Sometimes cinema doesn’t really need a language. It just needs to be authentic.”

Rio and Beso are not claiming a revolution has arrived. They are describing a moment which signals that the work has far outpaced the infrastructure meant to support it. International festivals are paying attention to Indian independent films and filmmakers, social media is offering them new routes to reach audiences, and the stories are strong. What is missing is a reliable path from the festival screen to the ordinary viewer.

Several things follow from what they said. Independent Indian cinema’s future depends less on whether more films like Angh get made, because they will, than on whether distributors, exhibitors and streaming platforms learn to treat them as releases with audiences rather than as prestige curiosities. It depends on marketing models that don’t require a studio’s budget, such as regular, predictable screening slots that audiences learn to look for. And it depends on critics and cultural media, whom Beso explicitly invites to take on the work of building curiosity before a film opens.

For now, the Oscar campaign looms on the horizon, and Rio is determined to stay as he is. His hope is to “stay true and stay organic” to the voice that got him here. Whether the Indian industry can meet that voice halfway is the question his success has put on the table.

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