There’s something powerful about seeing your own world on screen. For Theja Rio, an Indigenous Naga filmmaker from the Angami community in northeast India, that realisation came early, not because he saw himself reflected in cinema, but precisely because he didn’t.
“I rarely saw people like us represented,” he tells The Indian Sun. “And when we were, it was often through an outsider’s lens.”
So he picked up a camera. And he hasn’t put it down since.
Growing up in Nagaland in the early 2000s, Rio was surrounded by stories. Not necessarily in books, but in conversations, folklore, songs, church gatherings and oral histories passed down by elders. His world was also changing, caught between tradition and modernity, Indigenous beliefs and Christianity, memory and forgetting.
“Filmmaking became a way for me to preserve and reinterpret the world I came from.”
It is an idea that goes to the heart of what film curator and critic Meenakshi Shedde calls “narrative sovereignty”, the right of Indigenous and marginalised people to tell their own stories, in their own voices.
Shedde has spent years researching and curating Indigenous, Dalit and marginalised cinema in India. In 2016, she curated a package on caste for the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, an experience that set her “on the path of trying to use the arts to provoke social change”.
That thinking shaped Changing the Narrative: Indian Indigenous Films: Cinema from the Margins, held on 22 August as part of the Indian Film Festival of Melbourne (IFFM), where Rio’s work was showcased.
His short film Ade (On a Sunday) is deceptively simple. Two young Naga boys skip church to go swimming, borrowing from Rio’s own childhood.
“We would sometimes bunk Sunday school and be mischievous and get into trouble,” he says.
Rio chose to tell the story through children because “children observe without fully understanding. They stand at the edge of the adult world and absorb things in fragments.”
If Ade draws on childhood mischief, Remains enters much darker territory. The psychological horror film connects a Caribbean migrant in Britain with a Naga woman whose remains are held in a colonial collection.
For Rio, horror was not simply a stylistic choice. “Colonialism in many aspects is already a horror story. It’s a history filled with violence, displacement, theft and erasure.”
In Remains, he says, “the haunting isn’t simply supernatural. It’s the return of a past that was never properly acknowledged.”
The unlikely connection between the two characters also reflects how colonialism linked communities thousands of kilometres apart.
“The British Empire moved people, objects and bodies across continents,” Rio says. “Colonialism doesn’t only affect one community in isolation; it creates echoes across different histories and different peoples.”
For Shedde, films such as Rio’s challenge both the narrow international understanding of Indian cinema and stereotypes about Indigenous communities.
“Indians and others have primitive ideas about Indigenous people, adivasis, tribals, being merely people in loincloths with bows and arrows,” she says. “In fact, many of these voices are far more modern than we imagine.”
Rio’s work is increasingly travelling beyond those margins. Remains was shot on 35mm film and Ade on 16mm. His debut feature, Angh, also shot on 16mm, has been selected for the Platform Competition at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Shedde, who is Senior Programme Advisor, South Asia at TIFF, calls the achievement “an amazing milestone”.
Yet behind Rio’s growing international profile is a concern closer to home.
“Many of the stories I grew up hearing were never written down,” he says. “They existed because someone remembered them and chose to pass them on. Today, that chain feels more fragile than ever.”
For Rio, cinema cannot freeze culture in time, but it can preserve ways of seeing and remembering.
That extends to connections with First Nations storytelling in Australia, where he sees shared concerns around land, ancestry, collective memory and reclaiming narratives historically told by outsiders, while acknowledging that the colonial histories are different.
Rio’s Ade (On a Sunday) and Remains were screened at IFFM on Sunday, bringing those questions of identity, memory and belonging to a Melbourne audience.
And when Rio thinks about a young Naga filmmaker watching his films decades from now, what he hopes they find is simple.
“More than anything, I hope they find confidence.”
“I hope future filmmakers see my work and realise that their stories are enough, that they don’t need to imitate anyone else’s culture, language or worldview to be worthy of cinema.”
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