Red Island

Red Island (L'Île rouge, 2023) is a French drama you can watch online on iFILM. The setting is Madagascar at the start of the 1970s, where a French air base is living out the final, easy years of colonial rule — pilots, their wives, poolside parties and a world that assumes it will last forever.

Most of it unfolds through the eyes of Thomas, a boy not quite ten who reads comic-book adventures about a girl detective and tries to map their logic onto the adults around him. The child sees what the grown-ups miss: cracks in the marriages, quiet unease, and the resentment building among Malagasy people for whom this idyll means something very different. Director Robin Campillo, known for the Cannes-honored BPM (Beats Per Minute), drew on his own childhood here. Sun-soaked and slow, it gradually darkens. One for fans of patient, personal arthouse cinema about memory and the end of empire. Stream Red Island (2023) online on iFILM.