Tabrez Noorani's Love Sonia is a well-meaning and sincere, if uneven and unsubtle, attempt to dramatise the horrors of sex trafficking. Noorani and co-writer Ted Caplan map the journey of an adolescent from a dust-laden village in India to high-rises and villas in Los Angeles.

The writers Ted Caplan, Tabrez Noorani and Alkesh Vaja open the movie with innocence of the adolescent age where a young Amar (Abhishek Bharate) displays his favourite butterfly captured in a glass jar to his friends. He asks them to offer their cheeks to the butterfly as the unharmful and colourful bird tries to escape from the jar to get her freedom. After a couple of reels, Amar says, he can have the kiss of the butterfly and can even free her at his will.

Sonia Love opens in an impoverished, seemingly drought-ridden village that's identified solely as '1400 km north of Mumbai'. The idea perhaps, as one would speculate, is to indicate how far removed this hamlet is from a global metropolis or to highlight the distance the two minor girls in the film are trafficked.

It's a sad reality that sometimes, burdened by circumstances, parents do horrible things to their children. Love Sonia starts with a poor farmer (Adil Hussain), who seeing no way out, decides to sell his elder daughter Preeti (Riya Sisodiya), to Dada Thakur (Anupam Kher), the moneylender he owes money to. Anjali (Sai Tamhankar) is a middle-woman for a Mumbai based pimp Faisal (Manoj Bajpayee) and sells her to him.

Love Sonia begins with the image of a butterfly caged in a glass jar. The boy holding the jar has captured the butterfly for, what he calls, a kiss. Each time he opens the lid and presses his face against the mouth of the jar, the butterfly flutters on his cheek. A few scenes later, the boy remarks that after a few days, the butterfly starts to think of the jar as its home.

Director Tabrez Nooraani's drama, Love Sonia, opens with a group of school children observing a butterfly trapped in a glass jar. Noorani does not waste time dwelling on this innocence and playfulness. The lyrical scene, with its obvious metaphor, is a preamble to a story about the sex trade and human trafficking. It is quickly left behind to focus on the plight of a debt-ridden farmer and his daughters.

A broke and hungry farmer (Adil Hussain) sells off his teenage daughter Preeti (Riya Sisodia) to local loan shark Dada Thakur (Anupam Kher). Unable to bear the separation from Preeti, younger sister Sonia (Mrunal Thakur) goes to Dada Thakur's house. She doesn't think of the consequences. She is about to get the shock of her life.

Love Sonia is a story set somewhere far away from the cry and chaos of metropolitan cities. It's the story revolving around two sisters Sonia (Mrunal Thakur) and Preeti (Riya Sisodiya). Their farmer father Shiva (Adil Hussain) is burdened under the monetary pressure of Dada Thakur (Anupam Kher).

Belonging to a drought prone village in India, a debt-ridden farmer (Adil Hussain) grapples with poverty and desperation. Despite the dire circumstances, his daughters - teen sisters Sonia (Mrunal Thakur) and Preeti choose to be happy. But their undying spirit takes a beating when the hapless father decides to sell off Preeti to a local landlord for money.

Though several films have been made on human trafficking in India, not many have the same impact on you like Tabrez Noorani's Love Sonia. The film revolves around Sonia, the daughter of a poor farmer, who unknowingly ventures into the murky world of human trafficking to rescue her sister. Her journey takes her from a drought-struck village in Maharashtra to the dingy parts of Mumbai to USA and then back to India.