Humans in the Loop 2025

Nehma, Sonal Madhushankar, an Adivasi woman of the Oraon community, returns to her native village in Jharkhand from Ranchi, bringing her daughter Dhaanu and infant son Guntu after the breakdown of her dhuku marriage (live-in relationship). To support her family, she takes up a job at a local data-labelling centre, where workers annotate images and videos to train artificial intelligence systems for international clients. Soon, she notices a troubling gap between the rigid categories demanded by the AI and the ecological wisdom of her own community, a clash that forces her to rethink how technology categorizes life and labor in a world that is not so neutral after all.

Dhaanu, her daughter, struggles to adjust to the family’s new life in the village, missing the urban world she left behind, and she even makes a futile attempt to escape from the village, hoping to reclaim something of the life she once knew. The film invites us to sit with those tensions—the pull between a familiar, land-rooted way of living and the lure of a broader, more modern horizon—without smoothing over the human cost of such transitions.

Humans in the Loop is a social film that happens to be about AI: with its firm focus on indigenous women’s labour and the mother-daughter bond, it argues that the ethics of AI cannot be separated from questions of caste, gender, and geography. The narrative suggests that intelligence—whether human or machine—bears the imprint of its teachers, and that when those teachers are invisible, uncredited, or culturally misunderstood, the knowledge that is transmitted risks reproducing that absence. In portraying the quiet infrastructure of work that sustains cutting-edge technology, the film raises important questions about who benefits from AI and whose voices are left out of the loop, all while deeply grounding its message in the lived realities of a community navigating tradition, resilience, and change.