Following up his Cannes Film Festival sensation in 2017, BPM (Beats per Minute), Robin Campillo recently returned with his new feature, Red Island. A semi-autobiographical film inspired by the director’s childhood in Madagascar, following a festival tour it’ll now arrive in the U.S. next month. Ahead of its August 16 opening at NYC’s Film at Lincoln Center, we’re pleased to exclusively debut the new trailer.
Here’s the synopsis: “Living on one of the last remaining military bases amidst a hedonistic group of French armed forces in 1970s Madagascar, ten-year-old Thomas begins to find cracks in the surface of his family’s blissful existence on the idyllic island. Taking inspiration from his comic book hero Fantomette, Thomas spies on those around him, discovering the hidden and tangled political and sexual lives of the colonizers and the colonized. As relocation looms, Thomas questions whether the memories he has made are ones he should remember fondly.”
Alistair Ryder said in his review, “Even more than his prior work, Red Island is unshackled by burdens of narrative, operating as a loose patchwork of lived-in memories that are most engaging when filtered through the young protagonist’s perspective; adults discuss their affairs unaware they’ve got an impressionable child hanging onto their every word from under the table, or behind a closed door.”
See the exclusive trailer below for the film starring Nadia Tereszkiewicz, Quim Gutiérrez, Charlie Vausellem, Amely Rakotoarimalala, Sophie Guillemin, and Hugues Delamarlière.
