Glued. Hooked. Addicted.

Urban loneliness is a pandemic of the digitally distracted and detached.

And if one filmmaker has dedicated his career to exploring its many forms, eras and evolutions, it is Vikramaditya Motwane.

Meet the Experimentalist

Motwane has never repeated a trick. In fact, he changes form, language, ideas and his grammar with each of his projects. But if there is a common thread that lines the fabric of all of his films and his streaming shows it would be loneliness. “I’m a bit of a loner myself,” he has often claimed. Understandably, his protagonists are often shy, soft-spoken adventurists, who contradict everything known about the larger-than-life exuberance of Hindi cinema.

In 2010, a decade after he entered the film industry as a technician, Motwane put together his debut film Udaan. A tender, uplifting story about a young boy who stands up to his conservative father to pursue the career of his dreams, it spoke to an India cocooned by morality, post-globalization money and middle-class mindfulness.To many critics and audiences it is ‘the film that spoke for a generation’. This was India’s Catcher in the Rye, Dazed and Confused or the relatively better known Dead Poets Society. The film became the first from India in decades to compete at the Cannes’ Un Certain Regard section. 

More than a decade later, its angst and relevance has only grown among those waiting to emotionally, personally and socially come of age. Motwane has since made many marvels including the period piece Lootera, the survival thriller Trapped, India’s first web series Sacred Games, the mockumentary AK vs AK and the prestige drama Jubilee. 

The Tech Recipe for a Global Identity crisis

Who are we? What is our purpose? What makes us happy, content, curious or envious? These might seem personal concerns to us. For social media giants, these are parameters they are building their business on, designing their algorithms – redesigning us. 

Motwane explores this dystopian setting in his sci-fi film CTRL. In it an influencer who ‘lives her life on the feed’, asks an AI agent to ‘take control of her happiness’. The results are catastrophic. But in a world where dopamine is dictated by likes, shares and follows, it’s perhaps inevitable that happiness will be ‘automated’, surrendered to the whims of the machine. Machines that know you – or think they know you. Because who are we really, when not in front of a camera. Do we even remember, or worse, care?

The Disruptor on Disruption

With emerging AI assistants, text-to-video agents and the ability to ‘manufacture’ entire films with a prompt, what qualifies as art, expression and story? Could AI push self-aware ‘outsiders’ like Motwane to the fringe, or carve a new path to the centre? Can human creativity be supercharged, or will it be taken away from us? Or is it the very thing that makes us different from machines - gives us a soul?

This star director continues to explore prescient themes in his stories - digital toxins, melancholy, love, identity, technology, and disruptive innovation. At SYNAPSE 2025, Vikramaditya Motwane will exhibit his chameleon mind and throw light on his closet of groundbreaking ideas, the art of going against the grain, the view of AI from the trenches of the creative business. And how to understand disruption while wearing the badge of ‘disruptor’. 

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