The abolition of slavery in the British Caribbean in 1834 prompts Gillanders, Arbuthnot & Company in Calcutta, a part of the East India Company, to recruit Coolies from India to fill the resulting labor void. The company hires Sinha, a fierce small-timer to sell dreams of El Dorado to the unsuspecting, impoverished Coolies who are signed to five-year contracts as indentured servants. Upon the Coolies' arrival in British Guiana in 1838, the British planters promptly enslave them to ensure that the growth of sugar in the British West Indies will continue uninterrupted. John Scoble of the British and Foreign Anti Slavery Society arrives on the colony a year later to discover a new form of slavery; this time on the backs of Indians.
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Reviews
In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.
Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.
if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.
It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.
The film is about the abuse the Indian Indentured Laborers had to endure by the British during the colonial times. These laborers were granted a 5 year contract to come and work in British Guiana because a labor void had been created when slavery was abolished in the Caribbean. The acting was great and I especially enjoyed that the dialogue did not incorporate too much a heavy Caribbean accent so that everyone was able to understand and enjoy the movie.The lighting for this movie I think could have been better but you have to take into consideration though that back in those days there was no electricity and so the nighttimes were mostly spent in darkness. The sounds was good, it accurately portrayed both the ethnicity of both the African and East Indian styles.
Guiana 1838 tells the story of East Indian immigrants who were brought to the British West Indies to save a faltering sugar industry after the emancipation of slavery. The film presents the social issues which the immigrants encountered, among these are the relationships with white planters and African slaves. The writers have crafted the film in such a way that it supports the theory that East Indian immigration was indeed "A New System of Slavery." I applaud the film for making the Caribbean experience the subject of the drama and going beyond using the Caribbean landscape as a backdrop for some romantic escapade (this has been the case too often of films about the Caribbean). However, I left the cinema without the catharsis which, with a little more work, this drama could have achieved. This, I attribute to the lack of character development of the key East Indian migrants in the film. Some more details and visuals on the lives of the individuals before coming to Guiana would have helped the audience to identify more with the characters.If you like historical drama and interested in the story of dispossessed peoples ...check it out.
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