'Mahalle's School' Documents The Struggles Of Learning During Pandemic Lockdowns

The early days of the pandemic feel hazy now — like a strange collective memory we’d rather not revisit. Yet, it was just a few years ago when life ground to a halt. For children, that halt felt like a particularly cruel joke. Schools, their microcosms of joy, noise, structure, and social growth, vanished overnight. Education moved online, they lost much more: morning chats on the bus, paper-cut crafts, jokes during lessons, and lunchbox barters. Even adults struggled to reconcile with the solitude of lockdown life. So imagine what it must have been like for a child whose world had just shrunk to their home 24x7.

How they coped with this time is something that filmmaker Akshay Ingle captures in 'Mahalle’s School', a tender, observational documentary set in Akola, a tier-2 city in Maharashtra. Shot during lockdown, the film draws us into the Mahalle household — a family doing its best to navigate the realities of online learning.

The children's day begins with phones propped up on stands, earphones plugged in, with the mother hovering just outside the frame with textbooks and moral support at the ready. There’s diligence in the air. Online classes are treated with the seriousness of a regular school day. But no matter how hard they try, something remains off-kilter.

We watch as the children wrestle with unstable networks, get distracted, and squabble like siblings do. A lack of physical space and routine starts to wear on everyone. Even the teachers on the other side of the screen seem unsure, caught between maintaining discipline and acknowledging the strange limbo everyone’s in.

Through the seemingly mundane but new situation every one must navigate, the film says a lot, especially in a gut-punch moment when the young girl Janhvi breaks into tears upon learning that the lockdown has been extended again. Her silent stare into the distance, full of disappointment and fatigue, depicts everything about that time, what it took from us, and how much we were all trying to hold on.

Mahalle’s School is about how a family becomes a lifeline. In a small house with limited resources, the Mahalles become a buffer against the world outside. You sense their care in the way they quietly organize the day around their children’s classes, adjust to frustrations, and try to keep morale afloat. Filmmaker Akshay Ingle becomes the fly on the wall, capturing it all. His style is intimate and unobtrusive, reminiscent of Chantal Akerman’s devotion to the everyday. The chaos of online classes, and the fleeting joys of domestic life are paired with the close up shots filled with longing as the family figures their way out through months of isolation and uncertainty.

The documentary has had an impressive run — premiering at the 34th International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), winning Best Film on a children’s issue at Film Southasia, and travelling to festivals like DIFF, IDSFFK, and UNICEF Innocenti. Recently, Akshay received a grant from PSBT to expand the film into a 20-minute version, which premiered at the Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival 2023 and is now available to watch on PSBT India’s YouTube channel.

Follow Akshay here and watch the short film below.

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