Film-maker Robin Campillo has surrendered to the flow of memory and given us this wonderful, personal movie, created with tenderness, unsentimental artistry and visual flair, inspired by his own childhood growing up on a French army base in recently independent Madagascar in the early 1970s. It is the story of an imaginative little kid spying and eavesdropping on the private lives of grownups, which are a mystery to him and a mystery to the grownups, too. Red Island elides his own poignant growing pains with Madagascar’s emergence from the infantilised colonial state. It feels like a classic depiction of childhood on film.
Twelve years after its establishment as an independent republic in 1960, Madagascar still permits the presence of the French army to assist the national authorities. This has clearly become a plum posting for France’s military personnel: an island paradise (far more pleasant in their eyes than Algeria or Morocco) in which the actual business of governing, the heavy lifting of what Kipling called the white man’s burden, has effectively been passed on to the former imperial subjects.
