by Dov Kornits
With his feature debut set to premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival [TIFF] in September, the young Naga filmmaker will first visit Melbourne with his short films for the Indian Film Festival of Melbourne.
“I think when I was very young, when I was seven or eight, that’s when I started writing songs, lyrics,” says the still very young Theja Rio from Delhi, the day that he is to board a plane for Australia, his first visit to the Southern Hemisphere. “I transitioned into writing short stories and then screenplays. I had no plans of becoming a director, mainly because I had no idea what a director did. There’s no film industry where we come from.”
Theja Rio is from the city of Kohima in Nagaland, in North-Eastern India, bordering Burma, where the main language is actually English. “Once I started writing screenplays, I think I started becoming more possessive of what I was writing down and I didn’t want someone else to translate my vision to the screen. And that’s when I decided to become a director.
“I dived deeper and researched films, more foreign films, and it was after I found out about foreign films that my stories became more rooted to the kind of films that I would eventually make as well.”
Rio’s short films, the charming coming of age snippet Ade and his graduate film from London’s National Film and Television School, Remains, ‘a post-colonial push-back’, will screen at the Indian Film Festival in Melbourne, alongside the discussion event Changing the Narrative: Indian and Australian Indigenous Filmmakers Speak.
We often say that the only new stories left to tell are female filmmakers and Indigenous filmmakers. Can you comment on that?
“Yes, I completely agree, especially coming from India as well. The first image you get, the first frame you think of when you think of a film from India is not our film, especially even with the way we look … Everyone’s always confused. I’ve always had to explain the region that I come from every time I introduce myself and tell people I’m from India. I enjoy the shock as well and I get to do that with my films as well, which obviously surprises a lot of people. I think fortunately, it’s also arriving at a point where the film industry has grown to become a bit more diverse. There’s an embrace of certain voices from underrepresented regions, and getting validated by film festivals.”
Can you discuss your feature film Angh, which will premiere at TIFF?
“It’s a lot more rooted to the culture than both my short films, Ade and Remains. It’s set in the early 1960s, and it follows a village chief who was a former headhunter, literally someone who would decapitate heads. And the more heads you have, the higher class you are. That was the culture. And it’s crazy to think this was just 70 years ago. It’s about this village chief and his son who remained the last people in the region to convert to Christianity. And the whole film kicks off when an American missionary arrives to the region and almost the entire region has converted to Christianity, and it’s just the two of them resisting the social pressures of the new world.
“A lot of the people that come from the region that I come from don’t speak fluent Hindi. We’re part of India, and then we have our very unique culture that is very indigenous in its nature. We’ve been heavily colonized and almost everyone is Christian, we’re the most baptized state in the world. Our Christianity comes from the American missionaries.”
It must have been an ambitious thing to take on?
“There were days where I was thinking I was shooting myself in the foot because this was my debut. We were shooting in the middle of the jungle, shooting on 16mm film. And similar to most of my films, almost the entire cast were non-professionals, first-time actors. We had Douglas Henshall, who was a BAFTA winning actor, and he plays the American missionary in the film. And so just juggling someone like Douglas, who obviously comes with a lot of experience. And then you contrast that with people who’ve never set foot on a film set before, a lot of them not fully understanding what the concept of a film is also, and having to build villages. And that was a big task, but I think it paid off.”
CHANGING THE NARRATIVE
INDIAN INDIGENOUS FILMS: CINEMA FROM THE MARGINS
Screenings: Saturday 22nd and Sunday 23rd August Hoyts District Docklands
Changing The Narrative: Indian and Australian Indigenous filmmakers speak
Tiriki Onus and Theja Rio
Discussion 22 August, 2pm at The Wheeler Centre
For more information and bookings
