Angh review: Theja Rio weighs progress against cultural loss in Nagaland

Angh review: Theja Rio's Angh follows a Nagaland chief resisting cultural and religious change. Its generational conflict examines the price communities pay for opportunity.

In Short

• Film 'Angh' explores cultural conflict in 1960s Nagaland
• Village chief fights to preserve traditions amid missionary influence
• Young son attracted to new opportunities beyond village life

Progress is often measured by what a society gains: better roads, access to education, healthcare and new opportunities. But what happens to the things it leaves behind in the process? In Angh, that question becomes painfully personal. The film examines a community caught between the life it has known for generations and a future that promises greater possibilities, even as it threatens to change how its people speak, dress, worship and understand themselves.

Written and directed by Theja Rio, the film is set in Nagaland in the early 1960s, during a period of significant cultural and religious change. At its centre is Anghba (Anghlong Konyak), a village chief determined to preserve his community’s traditions as American Baptist missionaries bring Christianity and new ideas to the region. His wife, Anghya (Amah Konyak), is seriously ill, while their young son, Amao (Sobino Rengma), finds himself drawn to the world beyond their village. For Anghba, holding on to his heritage is a matter of conviction. For his son, the unfamiliar holds the possibility of a different life.

What makes the film affecting is that neither position exists in isolation from reality. Anghba’s resistance comes from a genuine fear of losing the customs and beliefs that have shaped his community. Yet the world beyond his village offers things that are difficult to dismiss, particularly when illness and limited access to resources become part of everyday life. The promise of progress is not necessarily a deception. The question is what people must give up to access it.

Rio explores this conflict through two generations who are looking at the same changing world but seeing very different things. Anghba understands the consequences of abandoning ancestral practices in ways his young son cannot yet comprehend. Amao, meanwhile, is at an age when curiosity naturally draws him towards what is new. His interest in the outside world does not necessarily mean he has rejected his roots. He simply cannot know what he might lose until the loss begins to take shape.

One of the film’s most unsettling moments comes when a child, barely ten years old, tells Anghba that his teacher scolds him for speaking a language other than English. The scene is devastating because it captures how early a child can be taught to distrust his own identity. Language is not merely a means of communication here; it is the first connection to family, community and inherited knowledge. When a child is scolded for speaking it, the damage extends beyond the classroom. It changes the way he understands himself.

This is also why Rio’s decision to tell the story in an indigenous language feels so important. It is a bold creative choice, but an authentic one. The presence of local performers, many of them non-actors, adds another layer of credibility.

The film’s soundscape gives these tensions a distinct emotional register. Sagar Desai’s score brings the cello together with tribal sounds, creating an unusual musical texture that deepens the film’s sense of unease. Rather than simply signalling sadness, the music holds different emotional worlds in conversation. It lends weight to the silences and allows the audience to feel the tension between what is familiar and what is slowly becoming distant.

Shot on 16mm, the film also gives its landscapes and faces a tangible quality. The forests are not decorative backdrops to a historical story; they are part of the community’s lived experience. As the environment changes, so does the relationship people have with the place they call home. Rio understands that identity is shaped not only by beliefs and language but also by the surroundings in which those things acquire meaning.

Anghlong Konyak gives Anghba a quiet determination, conveying the isolation of a man whose convictions are increasingly at odds with the choices available to his family. Sobino Rengma brings an openness to Amao that makes the generational divide feel natural rather than manufactured. Their relationship is the film’s emotional centre, even when its measured pace occasionally makes the narrative feel more drawn out than necessary.

Angh is not without its limitations. Its patient storytelling can test the viewer’s attention, and some moments could have been sharper. But the film’s restraint also allows its ideas to settle without forcing every conflict into a dramatic confrontation.

What remains is a troubling question about the price of opportunity. People should not have to choose between a better life and the right to retain the language, customs and knowledge that connect them to their past. Yet history is full of communities that have faced precisely that dilemma, often without the power to decide the terms.

Rio’s film understands that the consequences are not confined to the generation making the choice. They travel forward, shaping what children know what they forget and what they may never get the chance to learn.

- Ends