Television series proposal

LOGLINE: Facing a natural disaster in Togo, an emotionally damaged, but talented young logistician working for a humanitarian aid organization tries desperately to hold the mission together while she, herself, begins to unravel. Before she can help anyone else, Khaya Gumede must find a way to save herself.

 

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Nomakhaya “Khaya” Gumede (32) is a highly skilled field logistician for a crisis response project in a flood devastated region of Togo, called upon to use every bit of resourcefulness, ingenuity and problem-solving ability she has to help save lives and keep her team safe. As her mentor, friend and fellow woman in the trenches, Arden Trambley (61), is fond of saying, “the doctors have to worry about treating a patient. You have to worry about everything else.” Simply put, logistics is the lifeblood of humanitarian aid.

 

The work is unpredictable and the environment hostile, making for intense relationships that can swing from one extreme to the other; living in constant danger, bearing witness to terrible atrocities can spark bitter fights one moment and passionate romances the next.

Of course, most people don’t run headlong into certain danger just because they want to make a difference. More often than not, they’re also running away from something – and Khaya is no exception.

 

Khaya continues to struggle with the emotional scars from having been kidnapped during her last mission abroad. And back in Canada, she’s unable to deal with her ultra-conservative Xhosa, South African father, the fallout from an affair she’s been having with a married colleague, and a trail of other bad decisions she’s left in her wake. What’s more, beneath all of that, Khaya still struggles with feelings of abandonment and a lack of self-worth brought on by her mother’s decision to leave her family when Khaya was only a little girl.

 

Out in the field, amidst the danger, with lives on the line and people who need her, is the only place where Khaya feels at home and the only place she can escape herself. As Khaya sees it, the flood relief mission in Togo is an opportunity. She’s desperate to return to the field, hoping to find purpose and maybe a way to make some sense of her life. She has tried therapy and all the efforts to get her to stay home in order to heal, but she refuses this.

 

Despite Arden’s protests, Khaya manoeuvres herself onto the mission in Togo. Once there, she and Arden make a formidable team. They are aided by a group of international humanitarian aid workers, including Suj, Chief of Security, Mikael, the Medical Team Leader who’s falling for Khaya, and Koffi, a young local fixer with whom Khaya develops a close friendship. But despite her best efforts, Khaya continues to make imprudent decisions, starting an affair with Adjo, a local community leader whose connections to the military, rebels, and criminal underground in the area run deep.

 

With an onslaught of perils and crises created by the flood, and a complex political situation, Khaya and the team face an almost insurmountable challenge in Togo. At every turn, life and death hangs in the balance. And as Khaya soon discovers, the fallout from the flood also hides a darker, more nefarious danger. Young women and girls are going missing from nearby towns, victims of a human trafficking ring.

 

Khaya finds herself drawn into a tangled web of power, corruption, and ultimately, deceit. She is a woman on a journey, pulled in every direction by her sense of responsibility, misplaced trust, and a need to prove herself – while all along, searching for that elusive feeling of inner peace, and maybe even happiness. She is the fixer who is unable to fix herself.

 

A provocative character-centric thriller, Paradise Lost takes us on a high-stakes journey that

explores the themes of identity, trust and morality – set against the backdrop of real world socio-political issues. Energetic and chaotic as its brash lead character, the serialized drama is an honest, austere portrayal of a job like no other, in a place like no other, and the women and men who dedicate their lives to doing it.

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