Humans in the Loop

Name: Humans in the Loop
Director: Aranya Sahay
Genre: Drama
Released: 2025-09-05
Cast: Sonal Madhushankar

Directed by Aranya Sahay

Mixed How TezScore works IMDb 8.7/10

72 min 5 Sep 2025

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Synopsis

Humans in the Loop

Nehma, an Adivasi woman of the Oraon tribe, returns to her native village in Jharkhand from Ranchi, with her daughter Dhaanu and infant son Guntu after the breakdown of her ‘dhuku’ marriage (live-in relationship). To support her family, Nehma takes up work at a local data-labelling centre, where employees annotate images and videos to train artificial intelligence systems for international clients. Soon she starts noticing a troubling gap between the rigid categories demanded by the AI system and the ecological wisdom of her own community. Meanwhile, her daughter Dhaanu struggles to adjust to the family's new life in the village, missing the urban world she has left behind. She even makes a futile attempt to escape from the village. Humans in the Loop is a social film that happens to be about AI: With its focus on indigenous women's labour and the mother-daughter relationship, it insists that the ethics of AI cannot be separated from questions of caste, gender, and geography. The film asks us to recognise that intelligence – artificial or otherwise – carries the imprint of its teachers. And if those teachers are invisible, uncredited or culturally misunderstood, the intelligence learnt will only reproduce their absence.

Director: Aranya Sahay
Release: 5 Sep 2025
Run time: 72 min
Language: Hindi

Cast & crew

Sonal Madhushankar Cast AR Aranya Sahay Director

Mathivanan Rajendran Producer

Reviews

Indian-media reviews, grouped by reception.

Review snapshot

Mixed

The available source-linked Indian-media review for Humans in the Loop is mixed.

IMDb is a reference rating and is not counted as an Indian-media review.

Best forViewers looking for drama in Hindi cinema.

Reception Order

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The Quint

But Sahay is careful not to transform rural Jharkhand into an idyllic neverland. He pays tribute to his characters’ grounded knowledge systems, and to the struggles of their lives. Nehma lives separately from her husband Ritesh (Vikas Gupta), with whom she had an inter-caste Dhuku marriage, a traditional practice where the couple live together in a relationship akin to matrimony, without the legal sanction of marriage. But now their relationship has fractured and Nehma has moved out with both their children. To keep custody of them, she must have a regular job—hence the AI centre. In a society steeped in stigma, Nehma’s daughter suffers for her mother’s choices. Ridhima Singh’s performance as Dhaanu is very true to a twelve-year-old’s rebellion against her mother’s life.

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