Robin Campillo’s new movie, Red Island, is an amazing, moving evocation of his own childhood in Madagascar as what the Anglo-Saxons call an “army brat”. His soldier dad was posted there with the family in the early days of the island’s independence from French imperial control – and the 10-year-old roamed free in this lush and gorgeous place, but all the time aware of sexual licence among the grownups, their wan melancholy at their imminent expulsion from this paradise and the increasingly pointed anti-colonial rumblings among the Indigenous people. The boy is almost like young Jim in JG Ballard’s Empire of the Sun (played by Christian Bale in Spielberg’s film version) wandering with absolute liberty in the chaos of wartime occupied Shanghai – only here it’s with more sunshine and more erotic languor.
When I meet Campillo in the London offices of his UK distributor Curzon, he is a dynamic, athletic and yet also somehow cherubic figure with close-cropped grey hair (you can almost see him as a little kid), sparkling with energy and eagerness to talk about this movie, along with his career and what it all adds up to so far.
