“It’s paradoxical to embark on an exploration of the cinema of a region when the umbrella term used for it can itself be open to dispute. Is ‘Cinema of the Northeast’ a comprehensive enough moniker to club and contain films of Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Tripura and Sikkim? Are the geographically contiguous states of India connected when it comes to their films? The answer to these rhetorical questions is, quite simply, a no.

“As a broad spectrum for the outside world, the term ‘Northeastern cinema’ has been used for the lack of a better descriptive terminology, but it actually forcefully homogenises the diversity,” says the Assamese national award-winning film critic and journalist-turned-filmmaker Utpal Borpujari (Ishu, 2017).

Meanwhile, in a major shot in the arm for independent Naga cinema, award-winning filmmaker Theja Rio’s debut feature Angh, based on his own 2021 short, has been signed on by actor Douglas Henshall of BBC series Shetland fame. The international co-production has Rio producing with Nancy Nisa Beso of the Nagaland production house Winter Hymns Films and Bernardo Angeletti of Undercover Squirrel. To be shot entirely in 16mm film, the film has an international crew and will feature an ensemble cast of first-time local actors from Nagaland.

“Assam is rich when it comes to literature, mythology and folklore. There is a reservoir of stories to be told—politically, socially, historically,” says Adil Hussain. But the weakest link for him are the scripts. “Technically we can compete with the best but need training in the craft of scriptwriting,” he says. “There is a jadedness that comes to mature industries. Cinema of the Northeast has retained a certain innocence and charm,” says Bhaskar Hazarika.