Humans in the Loop: An Adivasi Critical Film Review
- Akriti Lakra
- Dec 24, 2025
- 11 min read
Humans in the Loop, directed by Aranya Sahay and produced by Storiculture Films, has been making waves on the global festival circuit. Following its qualifying U.S. theatrical release, the film is now eligible for consideration in the Best Original Screenplay category at the 98th Academy Awards. This milestone was achieved with support from the prestigious Film Independent Sloan Distribution Grant. With this funding, the film has a better chance of reaching American audiences and winning over Oscar voters in the upcoming awards season. Previously, this grant has been awarded to films like The Imitation Game, Hidden Figures, and Oppenheimer.
The film has earned significant international recognition, including the Grand Jury Prize for Best Feature at IFFLA 2025, the FIPRESCI-India Grand Prix, Best Director and Best Editing at the Jagran Film Festival, and the Jury Award for Best Feature Film at the Chicago South Asian Film Festival. It was also featured by The New York Times in its list of “Five International Movies to Stream Now.” Additional honours include Best Indian Film at the 16th BIFFes, Best Debut at the 2025 NYIFF, and a nomination for the Gender Sensitivity Award by the Film Critics Guild.
The film’s status in the international independent cinema community was further solidified when filmmaker Aranya Sahay and producer Mathivanan Rajendran were both honoured by the Film Independent Fellows Program. Humans in the Loop was in the running for an Oscar. With its rising critical profile, festival triumphs, and strategic backing from the Sloan Grant, the film is well-positioned for the upcoming awards season.
Ah, congratulations, Aranya Sahay.
“Human Touch” is the title of the article published in FiftyTwo by Karishma Malhotra. The same article from 2022 serves as the film’s inspiration. I was excited about the film after watching the trailer. An Instagram post announcing the film’s theatrical premiere shared that both Mumbai and Delhi would host screenings. Later, multiple venues hosted screenings due to its critical and commercial success. One such location was PVR Ranchi. The film was shot in a village near Johna, 39 kilometres from Ranchi. I attended the screening with other members of the community.
The film focuses on bias in artificial intelligence, much like it does in the real world.
Precisely as the main character navigates the problematic gap, the digital identity crisis and misinformation are becoming the knowledge system. The AI bias misinformation stems from a lack of representation. The film itself is an outstanding example of what it seeks to convey to the audience. The film itself is a data that has become widely well-received 'information,' essentially a Googleable knowledge stream within the global system. It was written, created and edited by a non-adivasi who has grossly misrepresented the Kurukh community, conducted inadequate research, and casually neglected important cultural characteristics.
1. Representation Without Research: The Violence of Wrong Naming
The marketing for the movie claims it represents the Kurukh language and culture, but is this true?
Let's talk about the Kurukh language representation.
First, let's make an effort to comprehend things from the perspective of a Kurukh adivasi.
Nehma, the main character. There is a word called NEHMA. Do we know what it means? “NEMHA,” a Kurukh word meaning compassion and essentially the same as Daya in Hindi, is the correct term.
Additionally, after people in the Adivasi communities of Jharkhand began adopting Christianity, many Kurukh names became widely popular amongst the Adivasis. It was at that time that these names were well-known and widely used. As a result of the missionary’s documentation of the community and its many facets, the Kurukh language and culture have been preserved, serving as a firsthand reference for researchers, providing ample material. The filmmakers had access to knowledge, but not the humility to seek it.
-Activist Jyoti Vandana Lakra, who teaches the Kurukh language and is also an international fine art artist, provided this statement.
2. Adivasi Characters as Side Roles in Their Own Story
The film does not cast Adivasi characters as leads but as supporting characters.
“Side characters in our own story written by a dikhu.”
An Instagram post announcing the film’s theatrical premiere informed viewers that both Mumbai and Delhi would host screenings. I dared to comment and got a response from a Savarna in NY, which was later deleted along with some of my responses. She justified why the cast and crew did not include Adivasis.
“If this film did not get made due to budgetary limitations, how would you even be able to make people aware of your community and history?”
This is paternalism disguised as representation.
“You need us to tell your story.”
Later, Aranya responded, smartly stating that only three people were not from Jharkhand, invisibilising Adivasis entirely. “NOT ALL JHARKHANDIS ARE ADIVASIS.” As a filmmaker with privilege, it is his responsibility to ensure correct representation, which we rarely see on screen. He wanted to make a difference, but took the story, labour of locals, ideas from the community, and our location purely for aesthetics. Awards for him. Underrepresentation, misrepresentation, and invisibilisation for us. This is an extraction. This is appropriation.
On the same post, an Adivasi brother, George Henry Minz, who watched the film, made an important observation. @humansintheloop_film captures poignant nostalgia through evocative background scores infused with Kurukh folklore, evoking the misty forests and rhythms of indigenous life. The film’s focus on Adivasi data labellers in the AI age offers a fresh lens on cultural erosion, blending tenderness with cautionary undertones.
"Yet, it stumbles in authenticity. The script’s Hindi dialogue, while accessible to mainstream audiences, flattens Indigenous voices, making it feel like just another urban tale. In contrast, Niranjan Kujur’s EDPA KANA immerses us in the same Oraon heritage via its native Kurukh tongue, stirring raw reminiscences of ancestral simplicity without compromise. A tender, if diluted, ode to vanishing worlds. Worth watching, but yearning for dialect's soulful depth."
3. Marriage, Shame, and Cultural Misrepresentation
Kurukh Adivasis alone have at least 12 to 15+ types of marriages, none of which are associated with shame.
Dhuku, in simple terms, is a marriage in which the man and woman live together. Not a formal marriage by the mainstream, but a marriage system recognised by the adivasis; it is the first marriage or union between humans and animals, as a law of nature.
Due to financial constraints or other situations, they are unable to feed the entire kinship, or when the parents don’t agree to the union, but the couple takes a step through Dukhu. Where is the shame? Why do you show shame? Adivasi women always had the freedom to choose their life partner or separate from their partner. The community doesn’t isolate or ostracise Adivasi women for choosing for themselves. They respect her decision to separate and return; they welcome her and her children with open arms. The community/village helps her take care of the children.
The film shows the isolation the lead and her children experience after returning. We have kinships, where are her kins? Why is she living in isolation?
Someone who isn’t from our worldview won't understand our culture. Still, the film has a brilliant scene: after a visit to the government office for the separation and custody of the children, the lead and her dukhu “forward” husband sit together. The lead says that Dukhu isn’t a marriage for you; that’s why you want to get married again.
4. Sakarkand and Other Errors: When Research Is an Afterthought
The lead wakes up in the morning, ties the son to her back, and, along with her daughter, walks to the forest to collect sweet potatoes. It doesn’t just appear naturally. We cultivate it. The one shown in “Humans in the Loop” isn’t the same thing. Small things reveal large truths: The filmmakers were committed to aesthetics, not accuracy.
5. Demonisation of Hadiya
The little girl doesn't want to go with her mom, saying that she was given Hadiya when she was hungry and to put her to sleep. A dikhu who doesn’t understand our culture ends up demonising our sacred drink! Hadiya is linked to our evolution story; it is present and functional in our lives, from the birth of an Adivasi to the death of an Adivasi. You consider Hadiya an alcohol, but it’s a drink that quenches our thirst, fills our stomach, and protects us during the intense summer heat, when our people are working in the fields, the mines, and as labourers. It’s good for gut health; it's homemade from the rice we grow in our field. Even children are given Hadiya by our aaja’s and aaji’s to protect them from heatstroke.
How many Adivasi women did the dikhu team speak to before coming to this conclusion?
In Samvaad the TATA film festival, Rupesh Sahu, a filmmaker from Jharkhand, asked the actress who played the lead about the demonisation of Hadiya in the film, to which she responded that the lead isn’t an ideal mother, and that's what she loves about the character; she accepts that the translation in the film is wrong because they don’t have that knowledge. Let me make it very clear that the question was not about the parenting style, but a degrading of one’s culture.
All this is because the film’s worldview is not Adivasi.
It is the savarna moral imagination projected onto Adivasi life.
They didn’t ask Adivasi women about their own parenting and cultural practices.
This is not just a mistranslation.
It is cultural defamation.
A failure rooted in savarna entitlement.
6. Sadri? Nagpuri? Bhojpuri? It all sounds the same.
One of the film’s most egregious errors is linguistic flattening.
The girl child decides to leave the village and go to the city to her father. She packs her bag, ties her brother to her back and leaves. The mother returns home and searches for her missing children. Unable to find, she approaches her childhood friend, the school's teacher. The background voices of villagers looking for the children in the woods are in Bhojpuri.
Sadri no, Nagpuri no, Bhojpuri ah yes, a language the mainstream will recognise, A dominant-caste language not native to the location.
Sadri is a common tongue we speak; our family who went to Chaibagan, Assam, and our family who went to Andaman carried the language with them. But we are talking in Bhojpuri in Jharkhand, right? As per the writer-director.
The filmmakers reduce languages spoken across Jharkhand and beyond Jharkhand -Sadri, Kurukh, Nagpuri- to interchangeable background noise.
To them, any “rural sound” is acceptable.
To us, these are markers of identity, migration, and memory.
This is not an accident.
This is ignorance protected by privilege.
7. Biju Toppo, Tokenism, and the Politics of Adivasi Legitimacy
While writing this review, I was conflicted about whether to mention Biju Toppo. He is a Kurukh Adivasi filmmaker with a distinguished, multi–national award–winning body of work—one that has shaped Indigenous cinema, community archiving, and political storytelling across the country. His legacy extends far beyond Humans in the Loop, and it should never be reduced to this film’s representational failures.
And yet, precisely because his work carries such weight, his presence requires critical scrutiny.
Biju Dada was brought on board, belatedly, as an executive producer alongside Kiran Rao at the moment of theatrical release. This timing is not incidental. It reveals the caste–class machinery of Indian cinema, where Adivasi filmmakers are not invited during scripting, research, casting, or cultural translation. They are brought in only when a film needs Adivasi legitimacy, a stamp of authenticity, borrowed credibility, a symbolic bridge between the story and the people it claims to represent.
This is tokenism at its most polished.
It is not collaboration. It is not shared authorship.
It is strategic inclusion without structural power.
Naming Biju Dada here is important precisely because I refuse to let the film industry hide behind his reputation while continuing to misrepresent our communities. His involvement should not be used as a shield to deflect criticism of a film that was written, directed, and shaped entirely by non-Adivasi creators who lacked the cultural understanding, linguistic integrity, and contextual research needed to tell a Kurukh story with honesty.
This critique is not about him as a person. It is about the political economy of representation, where:
Adivasi filmmakers are welcomed for their symbolic value,
but excluded from real decision-making.
Our languages, histories, and geographies are used for aesthetic value,
but our people are excluded from acting roles, creative agency, or authorship.
Our cultural legitimacy is borrowed,
while our lived realities are mistranslated.
By onboarding Biju Toppo at the end, the film attempts to secure an authenticity it never earned through process, engagement, or accountability. And this must be called out, not to diminish Biju dada’s contribution to Adivasi cinema, but to expose how caste–savarna film infrastructures treat Adivasi presence as symbolic capital rather than equal partnership.
This is how invisibilisation works:
Our names are invoked for credibility,
But our communities are erased from the screen,
Our languages are misused,
Our customs are misinterpreted,
And our women are replaced by non-Adivasi actors “playing” us.
To critique this structure is an act of Adivasi self-respect.
To speak plainly is decolonial.
And to name tokenism where it occurs is political.
Because if we don’t name these patterns, the industry will continue to consume our worlds while excluding our voices, continue to aestheticise our lives while misrepresenting our cultures, and continue to use our filmmakers’ reputations to legitimise stories we did not author.
We are not metaphors.
We are not aesthetic backdrops.
We are not stamps of authenticity.
We are sovereign storytellers.
And denying us that is not oversight. It is violence.
Adivasi Voices Are Not Optional
Humans in the Loop is a beautifully shot film with a hollow ethical core.
It claims to speak about marginalisation while marginalising the very community it depicts.
It critiques data bias but exhibits cultural bias.
It condemns invisibility but erases the Adivasi lived experience.
It is not a representation.
It is appropriate.
It is not authenticity.
It is tokenism.
It is not decolonial.
It is a repetition of caste power.
Adivasis are here.
We speak.
We remember.
We know.
And denying us authorship is a form of violence.
If you(all dikhus) couldn’t find us in Jharkhand, it is because you were not looking.
Or worse—you chose not to.
The critique here is not only for Aranya Sahay.
It is for every dikhu filmmaker who enters the Adivasi land with a camera but leaves without listening.
For every director who uses our villages as sets, our languages as props, our lives as metaphors, while excluding us from authorship, casting, decision-making, and representation.
This review is a reminder:
You cannot continue to extract from us while erasing us.
You cannot speak our stories without us.
You cannot profit from our cultures and then deny us presence, voice, or dignity.
You take our forests, and call it “location.”
You take our languages and call them “accents.”
You take our pain, and call it “plot.”
You take our women, and turn them into metaphors.
You take our culture, twist it, dilute it, mistranslate it and call it “art.”
But the age of silent Adivasis is over.
We are speaking.
We are writing.
We are filming.
And we are watching you.
Adivasis are not raw material for your cinematic ambitions.
We are storytellers, memory-keepers, knowledge-holders.
And we will not be flattened into your scripts, stereotypes, or aesthetic fantasies.
The message is simple and non-negotiable:
Adivasi communities are not research subjects.
Adivasi bodies are not metaphors.
Adivasi languages are not accessories.
Adivasi cultures are not empty vessels for your imagination.
This is not just a critique.
It is a boundary.
For all dikhu filmmakers:
If you cannot work with us, you have no right to work on us.
Adivasi stories belong to Adivasi people.
If you cannot honour that truth,
then keep your cameras away from our lives.
About the author: Akriti Karishma Lakra, Kurukh, Jungli, Adivasi.
A decolonial feminist researcher and Aboriginal woman from Jharkhand, working at the intersections of governance, gender justice, and Indigenous rights.
आकृति ओलग्गी!
घोखदन का कोड़ेम र:द्दिन!
मैं ने आप का लिखा हुआ फिल्म आलोचना पढ़ा, और आप का आलोचना से दुखी हूँ। मैं फिल्म ह्यूमनस इन द लूप का एग्जिक्यूटिव प्रोड्यूसर होने के नाते लिख रहा हूं। मैं मानता हूं कि फिल्म में थोड़ी सी गलतियां है पर इन गलतियों से आदिवासी समाज को बहुत नुकसान हो गया ऐसा नहीं मानता हूँ। आप ने जिस तरीके से चूहे की तरह कुरेद कुरेद कर लिखी हो वो कॉमेंट फिल्म आलोचना या क्रिटिक नहीं है। अगर आप फिल्म आलोचना, कॉमेंट और क्रिटिक लिखती तो शोभा देता पर आप ने फिल्म को, फिल्म के डायरेक्टर को और आर्टिस्ट्स को नीचा दिखाने की हैसियत से लिखी हो और ये कतई शोभा नहीं देता है।…