Kanav Jain, a Grade 11 student from Mumbai, has won the PLURAL+ 2026 International Jury Distinction Award in the 13–17 age category for his short film Half a Story, which looks at hate speech, discrimination and artificial intelligence. The award was presented in New York on October 9, 2026, at a ceremony held with the Hamptons International Film Festival and live-streamed.

PLURAL+ is a youth video festival run by the UN Alliance of Civilizations (UNAOC) and the International Organization for Migration (IOM). The film was selected from more than 400 entries from 80 countries, according to the release. The film also received a special award from Videomaker, a US trade journal and media company. Jain was interviewed by United Nations News and PLURAL+ officials, and the release says his comments at the panel were well received by an audience of UN officials, young filmmakers, media professionals and delegates from partner organisations.

Jain says the film began with a comment section. “I watched a stranger’s whole life get decided in a few seconds by people who had never met,” he says. “One photo became their identity. And not one of those people would have said those words to that person’s face.”

He then turned the question on himself. “I didn’t like the answer. On my way to school, I was doing the same thing, judging people I saw as I passed them, not online, but in my head.”

Half a Story opens with its narrator on the receiving end of online hate, which puts the audience on his side. Then the perspective turns: as the narrator travels through Mumbai, viewers look out of a taxi window through his eyes and find themselves judging strangers too. “If I had made a film saying hate speech is wrong, everyone would agree and nothing would change,” Jain explains. “Nobody thinks they’re the problem.”

He chose Mumbai deliberately. “In one taxi ride you pass every religion, every language, every income class,” he says.

The film connects everyday judgement to technology. “None of our judgements disappear. It all becomes data, and AI is learning from that data what it means to be human,” Jain says. “The harshest comments collect the most likes, and algorithms more often than that reward outrage. We are training something that will outlast us.” The title, he says, reflects how discrimination “usually starts with a fragment of someone treated as the whole person.”

He hopes viewers take away one small change: “Everyone you meet has a whole story. Before you judge, stay long enough to hear the rest of it.”