Belle

Belle (2013) is a British period drama you can watch online on iFILM. It draws on the life of Dido Elizabeth Belle, born to a Royal Navy officer and an enslaved woman, then raised among the aristocracy at a grand estate outside London.

Dido grows up in the household of her great-uncle, Lord Mansfield, England's most powerful judge. She is loved, educated and dressed in finery, yet kept off the marriage market because her skin marks her as an outsider in that society. The balance tips when an idealistic young lawyer enters her life and Mansfield faces a court case about the slave trade that could crack the whole system. Gugu Mbatha-Raw plays a woman caught between privilege and exclusion, Tom Wilkinson is the judge whose ruling echoes through history, and the cast fills out with Emily Watson, Miranda Richardson and Tom Felton.

Director Amma Asante built the film around a real 18th-century painting that shows Dido as an equal beside her white cousin. It's a corset-and-candlelight romance with a hard moral core, made for viewers who like serious arguments tucked inside the lace. Stream Belle (2013) online on iFILM.