A film about a disappearing world, with people who carry traces of that world themselves. Naga hands in every department, college students on set, and conversations about why this was not another YouTube video. The film did not only represent a community. In many ways, it tried to build one around its making.
“I joined the project around September or October 2024,” recalls Bendang Walling, who came on board as the casting director for Theja Rio’s Angh. He and his assistant travelled through Mon district, even to Longwa, the last village on the Indo-Myanmar border, visiting houses and looking for people who might fit the characters in the film. There was no conventional pool of trained actors waiting for them.
For a film that had already reached the final stage of India’s Oscar selection, the road to the Academy Awards seemed to have ended when India chose the Marathi film Gondhal as its official submission. But on September 20, Angh won the Platform Prize at the Toronto International Film Festival.
The award opened a direct route to eligibility for the International Feature Film category at the 2027 Academy Awards under the Academy’s new rules. Angh is set in 1960s Nagaland and follows a Konyak chief and his son as their ancestral way of life encounters profound change.
Walling, an NSD graduate, founder of Hill Theatre in Nagaland and an actor whose credits include Paatal Lok, had spent nearly 15 years working in theatre and film in the state. Working as a casting director, however, was new to him.
“I looked for personality traits that go with the very character written on the script,” he says. The conventional process of making an actor transform into a role felt wrong here. The film demanded a particular tribal language and a lived cultural texture. “We followed more of a very organic process… selecting people from that very environment where they don’t need to pretend like they are Konyak people, because they are already Konyak people. Real-time, real space, real people only.”
Finding the cast, door to door
An open call with posters was organised, but Walling knew what was coming. “I was pretty sure that people were not going to come for the audition. So basically, I pre-planned that the only option for me is to go door to door.”
With an assistant and the guidance of a local relative, he moved through houses near Mon town, somewhere between ten and fifty by his recollection, and then into three, four or five villages, finally reaching Longwa. Upper and lower Konyak dialects also differ, so they had to stay close to the specific linguistic and cultural register the script required.
What surprised him was the energy that met them. Older women and men, and young boys and girls, arrived with a willingness that felt adventurous rather than reluctant. “Konyak people are very adventurous… the kind of energy that they gave us; it really motivated us to go for more…. And for me getting to know the people was the most interesting part of my job.”
“My role in Angh went beyond casting. As the casting director, I was responsible for finding and selecting the people who felt right for each character. Since most of them were non-actors, I also took on the role of acting guide once the cast was finalised. I conducted a two-week acting workshop with the selected actors in Dimapur, where we worked on understanding their characters, building their confidence, and helping them feel comfortable in front of the camera.
“The intention was never to make them ‘act’ in the conventional sense. Rather, the workshop was about helping them connect with their characters while retaining the natural qualities and personalities that made us choose them in the first place,” he says.
In earlier productions he had seen how a single harsh word could send someone home. The production cost of even one lost day is high; for non-actors from remote villages, the emotional cost of feeling disrespected can be higher. He kept those worries largely to himself and focused on the practical work of skill training and understanding.
Part of that process was explanation, because cinema-going itself has faded in the state. “Part of this journey was explaining what cinema could be. Nagaland has almost no cinema culture today; only one hall remains in Dimapur, and in rural areas YouTube is the main source of entertainment. Halls existed in Mokokchung and Dimapur till the late 90s, but they all closed down. I had to gently explain that this is a sincere and important undertaking, and that we are honoured to have it guided by a very talented young director of international repute.”
He spoke about the chance for the Konyak language and this particular tribal experience to travel farther than before. He added, “In order to convince the people why this project is so important, there was a film festival going on in Mon town, by the district administration. Nancy (producer) and I had to talk with the organiser and convince them to play one of Theja’s short films, Ade (On a Sunday). And we had to introduce that this is the director who is going to direct the film.”
A film that built a community
This film was never merely the representation of a community on the global stage. Behind it was another story of community empowerment, and a conscious intention to educate people about the art of filmmaking. In a place where film and theatre culture is still being built, these choices speak volumes. “We are trying to educate our people about film and theatre art… education is very important… only after being educated people get to realise and understand any kind of art.”
Walling praises the way Theja and Nancy approached the production. “I think they did a wonderful job. They called up local people, they called up students from the colleges also, for helping in the production, and they just help out in something or the other so that they get to learn about the whole production process. So that at least they get some knowledge about the world of filmmaking… about how a film is being developed. And I’m so happy that Theja and Nancy took up this project not only for the film, but to educate our people also,” he says.
What stands out is how deliberately the film refused to treat the community as mere background. The production unit brought together specialists from Poland, Portugal and other parts of the world.
That mix opened a door for the local people and students who came to help on set. For them, the experience was not merely about learning the idea of filmmaking, but about understanding it by global standards and working alongside people who practise the craft at that level.
In Walling’s account, the cast was indigenous, the team was global, and all of them worked in quiet unison to realise a vision rooted in a community from Nagaland.
The Oscar eligibility and the celebrations that followed have stirred something larger. “The whole Nagaland has woken up. There’s a very big question going on in people’s minds… and I think this is very necessary because we need to give thought to the people.”
The visibility of art is now there. “It’s a very big motivation and encouragement, not only for the young Nagas, but I think throughout the country for the independent filmmakers that we can really achieve it when we make good films, and when we are very true to our art,” says Walling.
Nagaland has long been represented as a land of festivals, most visibly through the Hornbill Festival. But as Walling puts it, “It’s a land where there are human stories… we don’t celebrate festivals only, but even throughout the year we dwell in our own complexities of life. Just like any other country or any other states in the world. And then we have our own very distinct culture, tradition, language, which is so beautiful, which we really want to share with the whole world.” Through Theja Rio and this film, that quieter narrative has found its moment.
In his acceptance speech at Toronto, Theja Rio, the director, said, “I come from a small town in the northeast of India where dreams don’t often come true for my people.” For a film from a place with almost no cinema culture to earn Academy Awards eligibility is no small journey. In a region where dreams of this scale have rarely been realised, the quieter labour of opening those doors may prove as lasting as the applause that followed.
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