Rose Island

Rose Island (2020) is an Italian adventure-comedy you can watch online on iFILM, based on the true story of engineer Giorgio Rosa. In 1968 he built a steel platform roughly eleven kilometres off the coast of Rimini, declared it a sovereign nation, and waited to see what would happen.

What happened was a diplomatic standoff. The platform — 400 square metres, its own flag, Esperanto as the official language — became an international news story and a headache for the Italian government, which moved to shut it down with the full weight of Rome behind it. Director Sydney Sibilia (Netflix) keeps the tone light, letting Elio Germano and Matilda De Angelis carry the absurdity with genuine warmth rather than farce. It's the kind of real-history story that sounds invented. Stream Rose Island (2020) online on iFILM.