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A film about fantasies slipping away, Robin Campillo’s semi-autobiographical Red Island begins with a daydream, of a world of miniature buildings and puppet-faced men facing off against a masked girl. The girl is quickly revealed to be a visualization of Fantômette, the heroine of the popular Georges Chaulet book series that bears her name, and a particular obsession of Campillo’s 10-year-old stand-in, Thomas (Charlie Vauselle).

The film unfolds largely around a military base in Madagascar, from 1970 to 1972. It’s a decade after the island country’s independence from France, but various ties to the former colonial power remain in place, with French soldiers staying on their bases and working with the local troops. Perhaps inevitably, the oddly paradoxical Red Island is at once lackadaisical and urgent, relaxed but with a clear eye for how swiftly everything will end for the characters at its center.

Not that Thomas, peering...

"We don't pay enough attention. Things happen that we don't see." Film Movement has revealed an official US trailer for the French film titled Red Island, an intimate drama about living on Madagascar in the 1970s. This is finally getting a theatrical US release this August, after first opening in French cinemas last May (original trailer here) to mixed reviews more than a year ago. L'île Rouge, aka Red island, is set in the 1970s on the African island of Madagascar - taking place at one of the last French outposts at the end of their time as colonialists. The 10-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 & tangled political and sexual lives of colonizers & the colonized. With Nadia Tereszkiewicz, Quim Gutierrez, Charlie Vauselle,...

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...

Following the bracing sexual and political candor of “Bpm,” writer-director Robin Campillo’s much-laureled film about HIV/AIDS activism in 1990s Paris, “Red Island” initially appears to be a retreat into cozier nostalgia — a child’s-eye view of life on a French military base in 1970s Madagascar, flooded with sunlight, awash with the thrill of youthful exploration. That might seem an obtuse way to portray a time and place rife with fractious post-colonial tensions, only a couple of years before the African territory freed itself from the French Community to become a fully-fledged republic. But “Red Island” is a cannier work than that, slowly deromanticizing its purposely naive view of European family life, before sharply jackknifing into a different perspective, even a different film, altogether.

That switch is both arresting and jarring — a structural pivot that makes for a film easier to admire than it is to embrace. Yet its autobiographical elements are keenly felt,...