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The Digital Gaze
A Screening of Taak and a Panel on Gender, Technology, and the Future of Privacy
Speakers
40 mins | Dir. Udit Khurana | Hindi | India | 2024
In a world of uninterrupted visibility, surveillance has become so ordinary that it often goes unnoticed.
Taak is a techno-noir by Udit Khurana, a Berlinale Talents alumnus and the cinematographer of Netflix’s The Hunt for Veerappan. The film follows Shalini, a former wrestler turned nightclub bouncer, whose life begins to unravel when wearable surveillance is introduced in her workplace. Featuring Jyoti Dogra, who won the Critics’ Choice Award for Best Actress for this role, the film reveals the fear, anger and quiet rebellion that emerge when technology begins to shape women’s autonomy.
Produced through the Museum of Imagined Futures Impact Film Accelerator, a space where creators and technologists build new work at the intersection of culture and technology, Taak is both a film and an impact campaign imagining a future where technology respects our right to privacy.
The screening will be followed by a conversation moderated by Madhavi Jain from Aapti Institute, bringing together voices from policy research and technology to examine the shifting politics of privacy and control in contemporary India.
This event invites audiences to reflect on the emotional and political cost of being constantly seen and to imagine a more equitable digital future.
In collaboration with:
Speakers
Ishan Hendre
Ishan Hendre is a producer and strategist shaping transdisciplinary projects at the intersection of culture, impact, and emerging models of creative financing. His films include TAAK (2024), which explores how technology shapes women’s experiences of privacy in India, and Tenfa (2025), a story of the Kinnauri community set against a backdrop of a vanishing language and an ecology under strain in the Greater Himalayas. He has also worked on the Peabody Award–winning While We Watched and the FIPRESCI-awarded Humans in the Loop. Through Storiculture’s transmedia platforms Earthbound and the Museum of Imagined Futures, Ishan develops narrative-led projects alongside new pathways for cultural and impact investment.
Aditi Surie
Aditi Surie is a senior researcher and assistant professor at IIHS University. She studies how digital technologies—especially gig and platform systems—reshape work, surveillance, and everyday life in India’s informal economies. Her work tracks how platform strategies play out in the lives of workers, particularly women and migrants, and how new forms of service work—from quick commerce and data annotation to driving and care work—are being reorganized in the Global South. Across her research, she examines how devices, data, and digital infrastructures reproduce inequalities while also creating new forms of agency and negotiation on the ground.
Amrita Sengupta
Amrita is an interdisciplinary technology policy researcher with over 15 years of experience working in academia, industry, and the nonprofit sector. Amrita’s research interests and work lie in the areas of artificial intelligence, trust and online harms, platform accountability, gender and technology, and sustainability and tech. Amrita is currently a non-resident research fellow at the Centre for Technology and Society, FGV Law School, Rio De Janeiro, where she is exploring questions of AI and data governance, and the interactions of AI and digital public infrastructures.
Until recently Amrita was the Research and Programme Lead at the Centre for Internet and Society, India, where she led research on AI and healthcare, impacts of digital finance, misinformation, among others. Amrita received her B.A (Hons) in Sociology from Miranda House, Delhi University and an MSc in the Social Science of the Internet from the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, which she attended as a Chevening Scholar.
In the past, Amrita has worked in managing large scale people practices, diversity and inclusion in the workplace, as well as in conducting and leading long-form research on impacts of emerging tech on businesses and society, with both quantitative and qualitative methodologies. Amrita is on the Advisory Board of The Green Web Foundation, which investigates the environmental impacts of technology.
Madhavi
Madhavi leads communications at Aapti and has previously worked with Khabar Lahariya and NDTV. She brings an intersectional lens shaped by her Master’s at Ambedkar University Delhi, with a focus on critical social theory. Her interests lie at the intersections of gender, caste, class, labour, and urban life—with a deep curiosity about history, heritage, and the everyday experiences that shape social and political realities.
