Intrigue

Before independence during the 1940's depicts the lives of poor carefree villagers who are lured to work in Tea plantation farms and how they are forced to live rest of their lives as slaves with no traces of hope and freedom.

Paradesi is based on real life incidents that took palace before independence during the 1940s. The film is the screen-adaptation of 'Eriyum Panikadu' a Tamil translation of the 1969 novel Red Tea by Paul Harris Daniel. The film mainly deals with a tea plantation workers in the Madras Presidency during the British Raj. The Film delves into the wretched lives of Tea plantation workers. The Movie realistically depicts the lives of poor carefree villagers who are lured to work in Tea plantation farms and how they are forced to live rest of their lives as slaves with no traces of hope and freedom.—Sadiq Khan (sadiqkhandirector@gmail.com)

Paradesi is set in the late 1930s in a tea plantation run by British somewhere in Munnar. The people in a poor Tamil village are conned by a ruthless middleman or 'Kankani' to work in the plantation promising them decent wages. Little do these innocent people realize that they are going to be enslaved in a tea plantation as 'coolies' for the rest of their life. It is a double edged sword: Those who try to escape end up with their calf muscles cut off and those who reluctantly stay behind fall prey to deadly diseases and torture. In short there is no escape from the hell and they are destined to be slaves for life.—Chidambaram