Red Island

In his follow-up to BPM (Beats Per Minute), director Robin Campillo casts his nostalgic yet critical eye back to a recently post-colonial Madagascar.

At the beginning of the 1970s in Madagascar, armed forces personnel and their families are living in one of the last French military bases abroad. Influenced by his reading of the intrepid comic book heroine Fantômette, Thomas, a ten-year-old boy, sweeps his surrounds with a curious glance. Beneath the carefree expatriate life, his eyes are gradually opening to another reality.

Curator's Note

Using fragments of his own childhood in French military outposts in Madagascar and Morocco as building blocks, Robin Campillo's personal, period film offers a calculated blend of nostalgia and cultural unease.

By framing the film through a child's-eye-view, the film, the film depicts the complexity of the political situation in 1970s Madagascar by removing the didactic leaving something best intuited.

– Reece Goodwin, Curator (Film & TV)