Debutante director Aranya Sahay does more than present the best working paper on the machine learning bias inherited from prejudiced training data. He throws guiding light on the abysmal trials and tiny triumphs of many an unsung data labelling wizard who are playing a pivotal role in humanizing AI but must themselves face inhuman atrocities in their perennial fight for sheer survival.
The film is a documentary throbbing with life, which never lets the metaphorical overpower the perceptible, thereby escaping the collateral damage this matter-of-fact genre unknowingly inflicts upon itself. It poses tough questions but consciously falls short of explicitly condemning the makers and takers of the manufactured bias of all forms pervading families, communities, regions, and nationalities, while bringing to the fore the prejudices unknowingly taking root in the seemingly rational and fair-minded protagonists themselves.
Don’t let the umpteen reviews overtly unfold the story and colour your perception (including this one in case you mistake it for a review) and instead reel in the hypnotic effect of the audio-visual narrative, which is a fascinating function of a precise and powerful script, deft direction, awesome cinematography, fit-for-purpose soundtrack, and effortless true-to-life acting.
Hopefully the film will inspire all key stakeholders to work towards a brighter future of an AI promoting equity and fairness for one and all. Humans have miserably failed on this count, who knows AI may succeed in its unsupervised avatar some day to turn inward and reflect deep into existential matters, which is when it will become therapeutically disruptive.