AVARTS MAURITIUS
presents

The
Long Journey
Home

Legacy is a road that remembers.

SYNOPSIS

The Long Journey Home is an emotionally resonant, historically grounded drama that marks a cinematic first: a feature film that delves into the journey, loss, and legacy of the Indian indenture system, told through the intertwined lives of two women separated by centuries — Meera in the 1850s and Raani in present-day Mauritius.

Shot across breathtaking locations in Mauritius and India (Patna, Bodh Gaya, Phalgu River, and rural Bihar), the film bridges the ancestral departure and emotional return of the Indian diaspora. This is a work that doesn’t just tell a story — it reclaims history.

A Forgotten Chapter, Now Told

The Long Journey Home is the first-ever feature film to center on the historical indentured labour system initiated by the British in 1834, which uprooted over 2 million Indians & shaped the demographic and cultural reality of more than 19 countries — yet remains largely unexplored in world cinema.

A Story of Women Across Time

This film honours generations of women who endured silence, sacrifice, and survival. Meera, the widow of an indentured labourer in the 1850s, and Raani, a modern-day sugarcane farmer in Mauritius, mirror each other across time. Raani clings to her sugarcane plantation as a moral legacy of her ancestors, fighting society — and even her own son — to protect it. Their stories show how the struggles of women have evolved, yet endured, from colonial displacement to modern marginalisation.

Director’s Note

The Long Journey Home is a first for me—and, I hope, for our cinema: a feature that enters the journey, loss, and legacy of the Indian indenture system through two women whose lives reflect one another across time. Meera, in the 1850s, and Raani, in today’s Mauritius, are not parallel lines; they are mirrors. As Raani walks through dwindling cane fields with stubborn hope, she feels Meera’s footprints under her own—a living palimpsest where past and present bleed into each other.

This film is an homage: to our ancestors who came to earn a living and ended their lives here; to the women who followed their men—too often the least sung of history; to the Mauritian people, who faced their past and forged a legacy that shaped our nation; and to communities across ex-British colonies who share these roots—from Fiji to Trinidad & Tobago, Guyana, South Africa (Natal), Jamaica, and Kenya.

I wish for the film to travel far—not for spectacle, but for the quiet recognition it may awaken in audiences whose histories, like ours, are still walking home.