- Sri Lanka 1983, Jude Ratman is five years old. On a red train, he flees the massacre of the Tamils instigated by the liberal majoritarian government. Now a filmmaker, he takes the same train from South to North. As he advances, the traces of the violence of the 26-year-old war and the one which turned the Tamil's fight for freedom into a self-destructive terrorism pass before his eyes. Reminiscing the hidden souvenirs of fighters and Tamil Tigers, he unveils the repressed memories of his compatriots, opening the door to a new era and making peace possible again.
- For the first time, a Tamil filmmaker living in Sri Lanka views the civil war from the inside. In 1983, Sri Lanka was torn apart by riots targeting the Tamil minority and a war started that was to last 30 thirty years and leave indelible scars on the country. As a young child, Jude Ratnam fled to the Tamil strongholds in the north. But even here there was no sanctuary to be found as the Tamil rebellion descended into deadly in-fighting between the Tigers and other factions. Now the return of Ratnam's ex-guerrilla uncle from overseas exile provides the occasion for a re-opening of these old wounds and an impassioned consideration of what went wrong.
Evoking the memory of the escapees back then, of the Tamils in the south "crossing a road was like crossing an ocean, a continent, we were scared" and such terror unleashed on the mental health of his uncle's mother, Ratnam sets his focus on the uncle, who participated in the armed struggle and serves as the main witness in the film.
The story expands into northern Jaffna, the "homeland of the Tamils ", where the documentary carries out its catharsis through the soul-searching of the director's estranged uncle, with a meeting around a fire of the former guerrillas, who revisit their past offenses without burying their heads in the sand or bragging about them. There, he pursues to evoke the accounts of the internal struggles between the various Tamil factions, in particular the acts of violence by the Tamil Tigers. After the slow breaking of ice, they go on to discuss about the public executions, which are clearly troubling memories, recalling torture methods involving iron rods.
Demons in paradise is a reflective documentary on the ghosts that haunt the country after the civil war, as its citizens move past its memory in a dazed ignorance, where all traces of the war have been erased, but the fear has merely been hidden.
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