Two films show our present is the future we once feared
If Hindi films often turn to dystopia to grapple with technological dread, then filmmakers Udit Khurana and Aranya Sahay chart a more unsettling course—rooting their narratives in real-life premises. For Khurana, the starting point for Taak lay in 2020 headlines that detailed how Chandigarh's sanitation workers were being forced to wear GPS-enabled tracking watches under the guise of efficiency. Sahay's Humans in the Loop on the other hand, draws from reporting that illuminated the invisible workforce sustaining artificial intelligence: indigenous women employed in data-labelling offices set up by tech companies across rural India. Both films don't imagine the future as much as reveal the overlooked realities of the present where the burdens of surveillance and automation fall most heavily on marginalised lives.
Since its premiere at Mumbai MAMI Film Festival last year, Sahay's 72-minute feature debut has had an award-garlanded festival run, most recently winning the Grand Jury Prize at Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles (IFFLA) in May. Set in Jharkhand, Humans in the Loop follows Nehma (Sonal Madhushankar), a tribal woman who returns to her ancestral village after a separation. In order to gain custody of her teenage daughter and infant son, Nehma—a college graduate—takes up a job as a data-labeller at a nearby centre, effectively feeding information into systems that power an American tech company.
Alongside other women hunched in front of their computer screens, Nehma spends her time labelling images of crops, weed and pesticides. On some days, she marks parts of the human body—right arm, left knee—so that when the algorithms are eventually shown a hand or a leg, they know what they are looking at. And on others, she is training it to recognise a football foul or differentiate between turmeric and ginger. It's slow, repetitive work, but essential. For all its promise, artificial intelligence can't build itself. Instead, it is realised through countless hours of 'ghost work", a term coined by American anthropologist Mary L. Gray to address the kind of underpaid back-end labour that propels the artificial intelligence revolution.
Yet as Nehma delves deeper into the job, she begins to see the limiting worth of her own intelligence. Her American clients don't define her labour as knowledge—even though the job routinely necessitates her judgement and insight. When she refuses to label a caterpillar as a pest, arguing that it only feeds on rotting parts of the plant thus protecting it, her manager receives a complaint about poor data quality. Even when Nehma likens artificial intelligence to a child, saying it will learn the wrong things if fed the wrong input, she is told to stop using her brain. 'If the client says it's a pest, it's a pest," her supervisor snaps.
A graduate of Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), Sahay directed short films and assisted Patrick Graham and Imtiaz Ali before helming Humans in the Loop. With the film, Sahay set out to examine how new, cutting-edge tech still echoes old hierarchies, prejudices, and inequalities. As Humans in the Loop suggests, when algorithms are built almost entirely on data sanctioned by the West, marginalised voices and knowledge systems disappear and progress becomes just another name for exclusion.
With his directorial debut Taak, Khurana, much like Sahay, turns his gaze toward the politics of technology—how it becomes a tool that weaponises and perpetuates class and gender divisions in society. Like Humans in the Loop, the action in Taak, which also showed last year at MAMI Mumbai Film Festival, is located in the workplace. The 39-minute short revolves around Shalini (a magnetic Jyoti Dogra) and Komal (Ambika Kamal), two former wrestlers now working as bouncers at a testosterone-soaked Delhi nightclub. After a serious security breach one night, the club's management responds with a new rule: all staff members must now wear smartwatches, supposedly for safety—but clearly for control.
Held accountable for her team's lapse, Shalini—the older of the two women—is pressured to ensure that no one resists the new rule. She complies immediately, believing the management's pitch that the watches are there to boost efficiency with location-tracking and attendance-clocking. But Komal, younger and more wary, sees it for what it really is: constant surveillance. She's hiding from a violent past and her safety depends on staying unseen. With the watch, which has facial recognition built into it, being found becomes all too easy. Komal's resistance ends up as a sore point between the two. But more crucially, Taak underlines, it also turns Shalini into both a victim of constant monitoring and the oppressor expected to enforce it. In that, Taak reveals a disturbing truth: in today's digital world, the working class is often made complicit in their own subjugation.
Khurana, who previously shot Chhatrapal Ninawe's Ghaath (2023) and Sumanth Bhat's Mithya (2024), transforms the nightclub and the cramped bylanes of the Capital into a sharp metaphor for a surveillance state. A sense of danger pervades every exchange, every gesture in the film. By interweaving the plot with CCTV footage, the filmmaker employs sound and image to heighten this sense of entrapment and alienation—creating the feeling of being cornered in plain sight.
In a way, most films consumed by the idea of a dystopian future often get caught up in their own dazzling visions. So it's oddly moving to see two independent films—made outside of the constraints that plague the Hindi film industry—resist framing technology's threats as a sudden catastrophe. Instead, they lavish attention on structures and spaces designed to ensure that technology's grip tightens little by little, settling into workplaces, into homes, and into bodies. Few Hindi films respond to our anxieties as they unfold. Taak and Humans in the Loop go one step further and remind us that our present is the future we once feared.
'Humans in the Loop' and 'Taak' screen at the New York Indian Film Festival this month.
Poulomi Das is a freelance film and culture writer based in Mumbai.
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