Aranya Sahay’s Humans in the Loop begins with a sweet little porcupine rustling through tall grass. The image of a girl and the animal sharing a hush is tactile and intimate, and that image sets the tone for the film.
Mumbai-based Sahay recalls, “I saw Dhaanu walk behind something in the forest, a quill popping from her side, and I realised it was a porcupine.” The image arrived during a period of meditation while he was writing, before it migrated into the script as a motif. A shy creature both defensive and tender, always in negotiation with the world around it; the porcupine became the film’s compass.
Humans in the Loop follows Nehma (Sonal Madhushankar), an Oraon Adivasi woman who returns to her village in Jharkhand after a broken marriage and takes up work at a local AI data-labelling centre. Her 12-year-old daughter Dhaanu (Ridhima Singh) wants to live with her father in Ranchi but Nehma wants custody. Between those two desires, Sahay attempts to study what labour does to both knowledge and love.
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The film premiered at the 2024 MAMI Mumbai Film Festival and later screened at International Film Festival of Kerala, sharing the FIPRESCI India Grand Prix award with Payal Kapadia’s Cannes Grand Prix winner All We Imagine as Light.
It has since been part of the conversation on how indie cinema can push technopolitical debates into public view. But indies rarely reach the theatres. This year though a handful have got screen time, owing to, perhaps, the fewer number of Hindi film releases but also to the industry biggies backing these small gems.
Movers and shakers
Kiran Rao, whose Laapataa Ladies was India’s Oscar entry last year, came on board Sahay’s film as executive producer, along with filmmaker Biju Toppo. “What drew me to Humans in the Loop was the timeliness and relevance of this conversation, and Aranya’s craft as a filmmaker,” Rao says.
Her involvement is part of an effort to get regional, socially minded films out of festival circuits and into theatres/platforms. She cites the Amazon Prime release of Karan Tejpal’s Stolen (2023), on which she’s an executive producer, as evidence of audience appetite. “The same people who watch big blockbusters are also the ones who make indie films trend when they finally go on streaming…There are still a lot of people out there championing stories worth telling. Last month alone, we’ve had Humans in the Loop, Boong, Sabar Bonda, and Bad Girl — that’s a sign. Change is slow, but once it begins, it can be transformative. I’ll always be an optimist and say it’s happening.”
Folk trails
Sahay traces the seed of his film to journalist Karishma Mehrotra’s 2022 essay “Human Touch” (published on Fifty Two portal), which reported on data-labelling centres in Jharkhand, but he “didn’t want to make a journalistic film,” he says. “I wanted to imagine what it means to live in that world, and what kind of stories and relationships it creates.” Data labelling is when context or categories are added to raw data for Machine Learning. The project was developed with Mumbai film network Storiculture Company’s Impact Fellowship in collaboration with Goa media production company Museum of Imagined Futures.
A political science and Film and Television of India graduate Sahay recalls how his conversations with Adivasi women, anthropologists, and filmmakers like Toppo and Seral Murmu, shaped the film’s texture. “Philomena ji [wife of Padma Shri environmentalist Bulu Imam] told me, ‘When I walk on grass, I thank it for letting me walk.’ That philosophy enters your film whether you write it or not.” The Adivasi myth of creation that informs the film’s core philosophy — of an earthworm burrowing land out of a water world — came from an oral story he heard.
Behind the scenes
Shooting in and around Sarugarhi village in Jharkhand, the production stitched careful research into modest logistics. Cinematographers Monica Tiwari and Harshit Sahni (with additional work by Gunjan Jayawant) shaped the visual dichotomy of the cold glare of screens against the ochres and greens of domestic and sylvan interiors, while Saransh Sharma’s evocative score leaned into ambient textures.
Casting for Nehma took months. Sahay scoured lists, clips and local recommendations. He wanted a woman who carried the practical strength of Jharkhand’s breadwinners and the frail disorientation of someone encountering an urban site for the first time. He found that blend in Madhushankar’s filmed testimony; and the actor’s restraint and focus, he says, that allowed the role to land without caricature.
Sahay also learnt to let the location shape the film’s pace. “The rhythm of the place dictated the rhythm of the edit,” he says, describing how time in the jungle reduced personal anxieties and slowed the camera’s pulse. Working with children and animals required on-set surrender. “The edit is your ally,” he says. A cave sequence that threatened to fail on set was rescued in post-production by reordering sound and images. Sahay recalls repurposing a single porcupine shot in different registers, demonstrating how resourcefulness in the cutting room can compensate for what cannot be controlled on location.
The myth of neutrality
Over a crisp 72 minutes, Sahay stages the persistence of Nehma’s everyday tasks. The film’s drama hinges on what labels do when they are aggregated and when local knowledge bumps against remote expectations. One sequence crystallises the problem: shown a leaf-eating worm, Nehma refuses to mark it a “pest”, because in her understanding the creature helps the ecosystem. Her manager Alka (Gita Guha) instructs strict compliance — “put the labels the clients want to see” — while foreign clients on a Zoom call threaten to pull their contract if the labelling does not conform. Sahay speaks of the consequences of aggregation. “I don’t see AI as a neutral entity at all,” he says. “The way in which it is being developed is very, very lopsided…the problem is that there are existing structures within the world which will seep into algorithms.”
Rao sees the question of vision as both structural and philosophical. “In algorithms, the bias is data-driven and depends on the datasets an AI is trained on,” she says. “In cinema, it’s more ad hoc — driven by the mix of people who get to make films.”
The film’s moral horizon lies in AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton’s exit from Google in 2023, warning that humanity might be outpaced by its own invention. “A mother responding to a child comes from empathy. If we can pass that empathy into what we build, maybe it will take care of us. But if it’s only business interests driving it, then humanity will suffer.” Sahay says, “I wanted humanity at the centre”.
