New Delhi, Sept. 19 -- Theja Rio's Angh ends with a line sharp enough to double as an epitaph: Today, Nagaland is the most baptist state in the world. What precedes it is the beginning of that ending-a haunting account of how a state on India's margins was drawn into a colonial fold it never fully chose. In that, Rio's debut feature measures the toll of that assimilation on a single family, a village, and an entire history. It is also an act of correction: Naga history has rarely been told from the inside, and Angh insists on being one of the few records of a past that has remained largely ignored.

Set in a remote Nagaland jungle near the Indo-Myanmar border in the early 1960s, Angh follows Anghba (a masterful Anglong Konyak), the chief ...