BEHIND PARADISE

RED ISLAND A coming-of-age-tale that creatively explores France’s colonial past.

The film is set in 1971, when the French military still had a presence in Madagascar

From Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans to Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun, autofiction films have been popular of late with both veteran and newer directors. The long-awaited follow-up to his award-winning AIDS epidemic drama 120 BPM, Red Island sees French filmmaker Robin Campillo mine ostensibly similar semi-autobiographical details, here delicately exploring specific social and political issues. Without spoiling anything, however, Red Island’s structure and concluding POV prove decidedly more slippery than those other recent coming-of-age gems.

Campillo’s film is set in Madagascar in 1971, during a curious transitional period for the country. Located off the southeastern coast of Africa, the island nation formally became a republic independent of France in 1960, but various ties to their former colonisers remained in place, including the continued presence of French soldiers.

It’s during this time that eight-yearold Thomas (Charlie Vauselle) is living on a French military base in Madagascar with his family. ‘I realised there was another metamorphosis in my life when society changed,’ Campillo tells Teasers of mining his life for source material once more, after 120 BPM. ‘It was at the last colonial destination of France, Madagascar, where I was as a child.’

Like Sammy Fabelman in Spielberg’s film, Campillo’s Thomas tends to snoop on his parents when they’re unaware. He’s also drawn to flights of fancy, though comic books fuel his imagination a little more than films. Campillo begins Red Island with a delightful cold open, in which young masked crusader Fantômette fights criminals. But in Thomas’ real life, concepts of good and bad are not so black and white.

‘It’s this moment when you’re a child,’ says Campillo, ‘where you have evidence of something wrong behind this fairy tale, that the grown-ups are overacting in front of you, but you don’t fully understand.’ This refers to the disintegrating marriage of Thomas’ parents (Nadia Tereszkiewicz and Quim Gutiérrez), but also to the film’s political context.

‘You have a lot of colonial films that show people as monsters’

ROBIN CAMPILLO

‘You have a lot of films about colonialism that show people as monsters,’ Campillo says. ‘That doesn’t help because it’s a political responsibility to acknowledge that these people were our families. To talk about monsters doesn’t explain anything. For instance, it was very hard for me to recreate something I heard from my mother, when she said her father didn’t want her to marry a Spanish man, who he thought looked Arab. It’s a racist, xenophobic sentence, and my mother was saying it in the sweetest way.

‘In France now, people are saying cruel and stupid things, as though they’re normal. As though there’s no violence in what they’re saying, especially regarding the third generation of people coming from the countries that were former colonial places. Which is why, for me, it’s important to explore this.’

RED ISLAND OPENS IN CINEMAS ON 1 MARCH.