Sundance Film Festival 2022: TikTok, Boom Director Shalini Kantayya Explores TikTok’s Cultural Impact

Director Shalini Kantayya returns to Sundance with TikTok, Boom, a new documentary centered around TikTok’s vast cultural and global impact. I spoke with Kantayya at Sundance Film Festival 2022 about making the film and what she learned from the Gen Z creators she profiled.

Kantayya was first drawn to TikTok as a means of entertainment during the pandemic and became more invested as the app’s influence grew. “As the plot thickened with TikTok and news of the ban broke, I became really fascinated [with] how a teenage dance app could become the center of a geo-political controversy in this way,” she told me. “It’s the future of where things are going.”

Now every generation coming up is growing up on these platforms.

Her main subjects included beatboxer Spencer X and activists Deja Foxx and Feroza Aziz. “I basically looked for people whose lives had changed through the app in one way or another. It was a case where a lot of personal stories intersected really well with the political,” she said. It was refreshing to see the spotlight on a more inclusive group of influencers, as Spencer X is Chinese and Ecuadorian, Foxx is Filipina, and Aziz is Afghani-American. “I think when people [hear about] a TikTok documentary they expect it to be about stars. This really isn’t about that. I think it also has to do with who’s directing and why inclusion matters because it would never occur to me actually to do a film that was just about like the wealthy stars that have been made from the platform.”

The film explores censorship and privacy on TikTok, as well as diving into how social media is changing us at our core. “I discovered a whole new outlook on privacy and online [life] through hanging with so many Gen Z creators because that generation and younger [aren’t] attached to a sense of privacy,” said Kantayya. “They are like, ‘We grew up on these platforms. We were children on them. We’ve made mistakes on these platforms.’ They have a much different relationship to technology because they’re digital natives. I am learning the ways in which our humanity is changing based on this new technology and being the first generation of human beings online. Now every generation coming up is growing up on these platforms.”

Kantayya continued: “My concern is about mental health issues related to being an influencer. That goes even for social media users, not just influencers. All the studies that Facebook was hiding [and how] Instagram is making teenage girls more depressed. I hope that we can get more literate about how this is changing our neurochemistry [and] our attention. What I hope the film does is just broaden our understanding of how these technologies work and how they impact us.”

TikTok as a culture maker is astounding to me.

What surprised Kantayya the most after working on this project was how quickly people are becoming stars on the app. “I was amazed how this is being a new Hollywood and the way in which TikTok is churning out this new generation of stars,” she shared. “TikTok as a culture maker is astounding to me.”

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