Here is the complete film information
🎬 Director: Aranya Sahay
✍️ Writer: Aranya Sahay
🌟 Starring: Sonal Madhushankar
📺 Distributor: Netflix
🎞 Premiere: 2024 — Mumbai Academy of the Moving Image (MAMI Film Festival)
📅 Streaming Release: 5 September 2025
⏱ Running Time: 72 Minutes
🇮🇳 Country: India
🗣 Languages: Hindi & Kurukh
🎭 Genre: Social Realist / Techno-Documentary Fiction
🌐 Central Theme: Artificial Intelligence, Human Labour & Cultural Knowledge
📍 Primary Setting: Jharkhand (Rural Adivasi landscapes alongside digital workspaces)
In today’s world, Artificial Intelligence quietly shapes our daily lives from the videos recommended on our phones to navigation apps that decide the fastest routes and algorithms that filter what we see online. We often experience these systems as intelligent, automatic, and almost magical, rarely pausing to ask who teaches these machines to think. Humans in the Loop, directed by Aranya Sahay, disrupts this illusion by bringing us face to face with the human realities hidden behind artificial intelligence.
Screened as part of our Film Studies engagement, the film transforms what seems like a distant technological subject into something deeply personal and real. Just as every social media algorithm learns from our clicks, choices, and behaviours, the film reveals that AI systems depend on countless unseen workers whose cultural knowledge and lived experiences shape machine learning itself. Through the story of Nehma, an Adivasi data labeler, the documentary exposes the invisible human labour that powers digital innovation labour that remains unrecognized even as technology becomes central to modern life.
Rather than celebrating AI as a technological marvel alone, Humans in the Loop redirects our attention toward the people embedded within these systems. It invites viewers to rethink technology not as independent intelligence but as a reflection of human decisions, cultures, and inequalities, ultimately asking a powerful question:
When machines learn to see the world, whose reality are they learning to recognize and whose do they overlook?
Watching Humans in the Loop is not merely an encounter with a film about Artificial Intelligence; it is an encounter with the hidden human condition embedded within technological progress. The screening gradually transforms the viewer’s perception of AI from a futuristic abstraction into a deeply social and emotional reality shaped by ordinary lives.
What makes the film particularly powerful is its refusal to dramatize technology as either utopian or dystopian. Instead, it reveals AI as mundane, repetitive, and human-dependent. The machine does not replace humanity; it quietly absorbs human labour, perception, and even cultural bias. Through Nehma’s journey, we begin to recognize that every “smart” system carries invisible fingerprints of workers whose stories remain untold.
The film also invites personal reflection. In our everyday lives, we interact constantly with recommendation algorithms, automated translations, facial recognition, and digital assistants. Yet we rarely acknowledge the countless individuals who train these systems through repetitive tasks similar to Nehma’s work. The film therefore transforms spectators into participants, compelling us to reconsider our own position within digital culture not merely as users of technology but as contributors to its learning processes.
From a broader perspective, Humans in the Loop challenges the dominant narrative of technological neutrality. It suggests that artificial intelligence is not simply engineered; it is culturally produced. Algorithms inherit human assumptions, social hierarchies, and historical inequalities. In this sense, the film becomes less about machines and more about responsibility: ethical responsibility, representational responsibility, and collective responsibility toward the futures we are building through technology.
Ultimately, the film leaves viewers with a quiet but unsettling realization:
Technology does not merely shape society society shapes technology first.
And perhaps that is the film’s most enduring insight:
The intelligence of machines is only as humane, inclusive, and ethical as the humans who remain within their loop.
WORKSHEET FILM SCREENING ARANYA SAHAY'S HUMANS IN THE LOOP
TASK 1: AI, BIAS, & EPISTEMIC REPRESENTATION
1. How does the narrative expose algorithmic bias as culturally situated rather than purely technical?
The narrative of Humans in the Loop (2024) reveals algorithmic bias not as a simple technological malfunction but as a culturally embedded phenomenon shaped by human perception and social context. The film demonstrates that artificial intelligence systems depend fundamentally on human-generated datasets for training and classification. Through Nehma’s work as a data-labeller, viewers witness how AI platforms require her to categorize images and contextual information according to predefined computational labels designed elsewhere.
However, these standardized classifications frequently fail to capture indigenous ecological knowledge grounded in lived experience, cultural memory, and local practices. As a result, Nehma is compelled to translate complex environmental understanding into simplified algorithmic categories that strip away nuance and cultural specificity. This tension exposes the limits of computational logic when confronted with experiential knowledge systems.
The film thereby illustrates that algorithmic bias emerges not from faulty code alone but from dominant socio-cultural assumptions embedded within technological design. Machine learning systems inherit the perspectives, priorities, and limitations of the societies that create and train them. Consequently, the narrative positions AI as an ideological construct shaped by cultural interpretation rather than an objective or neutral technological authority.
2. In what ways does the film highlight epistemic hierarchies that is, whose knowledge counts in technological systems?
The film foregrounds epistemic hierarchies by portraying the unequal valuation of knowledge systems within AI training environments. Nehma’s indigenous knowledge, developed through intimate interaction with local landscapes and ecological rhythms, is presented as contextual, relational, and experiential. Yet the AI interface privileges standardized, data-driven knowledge aligned with scientific rationality and corporate technological frameworks.
This contrast establishes a hierarchy in which indigenous ways of knowing become marginalized or rendered invisible within digital infrastructures. The system demands that Nehma reshape her cultural understanding into rigid algorithmic categories, effectively translating living knowledge into abstract data points. In doing so, technological systems validate only those forms of knowledge that conform to dominant epistemologies.
The film thus exposes how digital technologies reproduce existing global power relations by determining whose knowledge is considered legitimate and whose is excluded. AI training becomes not merely a technical process but a site where cultural authority and intellectual legitimacy are negotiated and contested.
3. Support your answer with film studies concepts such as representation, ideology, and power relations.
From a film studies perspective, the representation of AI systems in Humans in the Loop operates as an ideological construct reflecting broader socio-political power dynamics. The film challenges the widespread belief in technological neutrality by portraying AI as embedded within structures of economic and cultural dominance that shape knowledge production.
Through Nehma’s participation in digital labour, the narrative reveals a paradox: marginalized communities actively contribute to the development of advanced technologies while remaining excluded from decision-making processes regarding how their knowledge is represented or utilized. This dynamic aligns with ideological critiques in film theory, which argue that media texts often reproduce social hierarchies by privileging dominant cultural perspectives.
The film’s cinematic representation therefore becomes a critical tool for exposing power relations within technological systems. By visualizing invisible labour and epistemic exclusion, Humans in the Loop questions the legitimacy of technological objectivity and encourages viewers to reconsider AI as a socially constructed medium shaped by ideology, representation, and unequal distributions of power.
TASK 2: LABOUR & THE POLITICS OF CINEMATIC VISIBILITY
1. How does the film’s visual language represent labelling work and the emotional experience of labour?
In Humans in the Loop, invisible labour is rendered visible through a carefully constructed visual language that emphasizes repetition, stillness, and emotional restraint. The film repeatedly shows Nehma engaged in data-labelling tasks within digitally mediated workspaces, where static camera framing and prolonged shots of computer interfaces highlight the mechanical rhythm of her work. Close-up visuals of screens, cursors, and annotation tools reduce human movement, visually aligning the worker’s body with the machine’s repetitive logic.
The editing structure reinforces this monotony through recurring sequences that mimic the cyclical nature of labelling work itself. Unlike the fluid and organic cinematography of village life, the AI workspace is portrayed as spatially confined and technologically sterile. This contrast creates a strong visual dichotomy between lived experience and algorithmic routine.
Furthermore, subdued sound design marked by silence, faint keyboard clicks, and the absence of natural ambience intensifies the emotional atmosphere of isolation and cognitive fatigue. Through these cinematic choices, the film communicates not only the physical repetition of digital labour but also its psychological impact, portraying labour as emotionally draining despite its seemingly immaterial nature.
2. What does this suggest about cultural valuation of marginalised work?
The film’s representation of data-labelling labour suggests that work performed by marginalized communities remains culturally invisible and undervalued, even when it is fundamental to advanced technological systems. While artificial intelligence is often celebrated as autonomous innovation, the narrative exposes its dependence on the manual cognitive efforts of workers like Nehma.
From a Marxist theoretical perspective, this dynamic reflects the commodification of human labour within digital capitalism, where intellectual attention and emotional endurance are converted into economic value without proportional recognition or social visibility. The labour that enables AI development is outsourced, fragmented, and detached from authorship, leaving workers excluded from the prestige associated with technological progress.
By foregrounding this hidden workforce, the film critiques dominant technological narratives that glorify machines while erasing the humans who sustain them. The invisibility of such labour reveals broader global inequalities in which marginalized populations contribute significantly to digital infrastructures yet remain absent from cultural and economic acknowledgment.
3. Does the film invite empathy, critique, or transformation in how labour is perceived?
The film invites both emotional empathy and critical reflection by centering the lived experiences of individuals engaged in AI-related labour. Through its intimate portrayal of Nehma’s daily routines, family responsibilities, and emotional struggles, the narrative humanizes digital work that is typically perceived as abstract or automated.
At the same time, the cinematic representation functions as a critique of dominant technological ideologies that portray AI systems as self-sufficient entities. By exposing the human presence behind automation, the film challenges viewers to reconsider assumptions about technological agency and progress.
Importantly, the film also gestures toward transformation. By depicting marginalized workers as active participants within global digital economies rather than passive subjects, it reshapes audience perception of labour itself. The narrative encourages viewers to recognize ethical questions surrounding worker rights, fair compensation, and accountability in technological production, thereby fostering a more socially conscious understanding of digital labour in contemporary society.
TASK 3: FILM FORM, STRUCTURE & DIGITAL CULTURE
1. How does the interplay of natural imagery versus digital spaces communicate broader thematic concerns?
In Humans in the Loop, the visual contrast between natural environments and digitally mediated workspaces functions as a central cinematic strategy for expressing the film’s philosophical concerns. Scenes situated within forests, domestic spaces, and community rituals are captured through fluid camera movement, warm natural lighting, and expansive spatial compositions. These visual qualities evoke a sense of continuity, relationality, and ecological harmony, reflecting indigenous knowledge systems grounded in lived experience and collective memory.
By contrast, digital workspaces are presented through static framing, artificial illumination, and spatial confinement. The rigid geometry of computer screens and enclosed interiors visually communicates technological control and algorithmic order. This aesthetic opposition operates within a semiotic framework, where natural spaces signify organic, experiential knowledge while digital environments symbolize abstraction, categorization, and computational logic.
The interplay between these visual worlds highlights a broader thematic tension: digital culture’s attempt to standardize and quantify human realities that are inherently complex, contextual, and culturally embedded. Through this juxtaposition, the film raises philosophical questions about whether technological systems can truly comprehend forms of knowledge rooted in human experience and environment.
2. How do aesthetic choices shape the viewer’s experience of labour, identity, and technology?
The film’s aesthetic design particularly its editing patterns, soundscape, and camera techniques actively shapes how viewers perceive labour, identity, and technological mediation. Sequential editing structures mirror the repetitive rhythm of data-labelling work, producing a sensory experience of monotony that allows audiences to feel the temporal weight of digital labour rather than merely observe it. The recurrence of nearly identical visual sequences simulates cognitive fatigue, aligning spectators emotionally with Nehma’s daily routine.
Sound design further reinforces this experience. AI workspace scenes are marked by subdued audio textures faint mechanical sounds, keyboard clicks, and extended silences which generate an atmosphere of emotional detachment and isolation. In contrast, scenes set within village life incorporate layered natural soundscapes, emphasizing social connection and environmental presence.
From a Formalist perspective, these cinematic devices construct meaning through sensory engagement rather than explicit exposition. The viewer experiences technological labour as embodied and affective rather than abstract. Simultaneously, identity is visually negotiated through contrasts between cultural practices and digital interfaces, suggesting how technological environments reshape notions of belonging, agency, and selfhood.
Thus, the film’s formal structure becomes a mediating force that connects labour, identity, and technology, revealing how digital culture reorganizes human experience at both emotional and philosophical levels.
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