Theja Rio’s Angh, an Indian film set in Nagaland, has won the Platform Prize at the 51st Toronto International Film Festival, which concluded Sunday.

The film receives a C$20,000 cash prize. Its Platform win also gives it a direct pathway to the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film under a new TIFF arrangement introduced this year. TIFF said a non-English-language film winning the Platform Prize is eligible for this pathway, making the festival one of six international film festivals with this route to the category.

Set in the remote jungles of Nagaland near the Indo-Burma border in the early 1960s, Angh follows Anghba, the last surviving chief of an abandoned Indigenous Naga village, who lives in isolation with his ailing wife and mute young son. The film was shot on 16mm.

Theja Rio, a filmmaker from Nagaland, makes his feature directorial debut with Angh, expanding his earlier short film of the same name. The feature had its world premiere in TIFF’s Platform programme.

The Platform jury was headed by Pablo Trapero, with Amma Asante, Sylvia Chang, Luc Déry and Albert Lee. The section comprised 12 films and was TIFF’s only competitive programme.

The award gives an Indian film rooted in the Northeast a major competitive prize at one of North America’s largest film festivals, while creating a new route into the Academy’s Best International Feature Film process.

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