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It rarely happens that you chance upon a lesser known film, it moves you such that you wish to re-run it simply to have closer, nuanced look at the stunning visuals & powerful characters in breath-taking settings that’s less visited by film-makers. Directed by young Aranya Sahay with sensitivity & depth, it has no recognizable faces of stars or messages to resonate with the masses. There’s simplicity in story telling that also depicts the raw courage people muster to face odds & challenges, as life continues to ‘throw a curveball’ !
At first it appears like a slow documentary initiation to the alien world of AI (Artificial Intelligence) that to ordinary mortals, is an enigma for the magical things it can create. If that evokes curiosity, ‘Humans in the Loop’ has the vulnerable yet insightful ‘human’ side that shows as AI pervades into various fields with new technology, it has inherent biases and its qualitative growth comes from humans and their intelligent interventions aided by the pristineness of nature with all its bounties.
While to outside world, AI is exciting with possibilities, in its basic form are job workers who put in diligent hours of labour as labelers and handlers to annotate raw data with humans providing feedback to AI models (for Clients) correcting errors and evaluating its output to ensure the meet the quality and safety standards. The film’s setting is the beautiful hills, jungles & landscape of the state of Jharkhand and is a tribute to its tribal women’s role that’s being played in the development of AI at the grass root levels. In the realm of AI, humans in the loop is also an accepted working concept.
There are three protagonists in film’s story, all strong women of varying dispositions. Main lead character of ‘Nehma’ is a tribal who’s a graduate, educated but disenchanted with her estranged marriage and bears the responsibility of infant child. She is fiercely independent and protective and has the indomitable will of a ‘survivor’. She has strong roots with her home & has grown up with love for nature and with deep understanding of flora and fauna, that she brings to her work as AI data leveler. Sonal Madhushankar as Nehma brings in her role, pain, frustration, fears and triumph. Her pre-teen daughter ‘Bhuvan’ is tech-savvy and feels alienated in a rural milieu & longs for city’s excitement and is beautifully enacted by Ridhima Singh. The third lady is the AI teacher played with dignity & compassion by Gita Guha. Another strength is film’s superb cinematography !
It would be quite presumptuous to draw parallels but old timers may find shades of Satyajit Ray’s path-breaking classic ‘Pather Panchali’ that depicted village life with great beauty and pathos. But coming to a more recent film on women liberating from age-old patriarchy & social dos & dont’s ‘Laapata Ladies’, this film too makes a bold statement. Kudos to the maker, cast, crew of ‘Humans in the Loop’- it’s brave and quite sublime.
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