The first thing you notice about the students in Shashwat Mookherjee's documentary is how little they have in common. A factory worker in Coimbatore who studies after his night shift ends. A homemaker in Patna who has not sat in a classroom in twenty years. A teenager in a small town who could never afford to leave home for an engineering degree. By the time "Portrait of Many Faces" reaches its final frames, the one thing they share is a quiet, unshowy stubbornness - and a screen. The film, which released on October 12, 2026, runs 80 minutes and belongs squarely to the Hindi documentary space, though its subject stretches across the country.
Mookherjee's camera spends its time inside the IIT Madras BS Degree Programme, an initiative that delivers an institute-of-national-importance education to students who will probably never set foot on the Chennai campus. The premise sounds dry on paper. On screen, it is anything but. The director, working without a recognizable cast and without the crutch of a narrator telling us what to feel, builds the film out of conversations, long commutes, shared screens and the small domestic negotiations that accompany any adult decision to go back to studying.
What makes the documentary land is its refusal to treat its subjects as inspirational fodder. There is no swelling score when a student submits an assignment at two in the morning, no dramatic reveal when someone clears a qualifying exam. Mookherjee keeps the register low, almost observational, letting the viewers arrive at their own conclusions about what it means for a programme like this to exist. The film follows students through online lectures, peer study groups and the occasional trip to campus for exams or workshops, and it is in those journeys - literal and otherwise - that the portrait sharpens.
The diversity the title promises is not just geographic. "Portrait of Many Faces" moves between ages, professions, family situations and levels of academic preparation, and it is careful to show that access alone does not level the field. Some students juggle caregiving. Others battle unreliable internet. A few admit, plainly, that they were unsure whether a degree earned largely online would be taken seriously by employers. The film does not resolve these anxieties so much as sit with them, which is a braver choice than a more triumphant documentary might have made.
Mookherjee's previous work has shown an interest in institutions and the people who move through them, and here he is working with material that could easily have turned into a promotional film for the programme. He resists that, mostly. The administrators and faculty who appear are given space but not the last word; the students keep that for themselves. The Hindi-language framing matters too. This is a story about an English-medium technical institution told in the language most of its students actually think in, and the film wears its linguistic identity without fuss.
For all its restraint, the documentary has moments of real warmth. A study group that has never met in person finally convenes in a classroom and spends the first ten minutes simply looking at each other. A student describes explaining her coursework to a skeptical relative and laughs about it, not bitterly. These scenes accumulate into something more affecting than any single anecdote, and the 80-minute runtime leaves little room for padding.
The film arrives at a moment when the question of who gets to be educated, and how, is being asked loudly in India, and it does not pretend to have answers. It offers faces instead - many of them, as promised. Some are tired. Some are hopeful. Most are both. "Portrait of Many Faces" is not interested in telling you what to make of them; it simply makes sure you see them clearly.
