Robin Campillo’s Red Island confronts France’s ‘forgotten’ colonialist past

2017 was supposed to be the year of Robin Campillo’s 120 BPM. An electrifying drama about the ACT UP movement in 1990s France, 120 BPM premiered at Cannes and was tipped to take home the Palme d’Or. However, when The Square won instead, Pedro Almodóvar, the jury president, cried at the press conference, claiming that 120 BPM was many of the nine-person panel’s first choice; years later, a rumour spread that Will Smith, a jury member, had vetoed Campillo’s queer movie from winning the top prize.

The expectation, then, in 2023, was that Campillo’s long-awaited follow-up, Red Island, would almost certainly compete for the Palme d’Or, if not win the actual award. Yet something strange happened. Red Island wasn’t selected for Cannes at all, and the Madagascar-set coming-of-ager quietly came out in France that summer without a festival premiere. Stranger still, when the film reached international audiences, it proved to be another stunner. The Guardian awarded it five stars. At the London Film Festival, during which I spoke to Campillo, the semi-autobiographical feature received a rapturous reaction.

“I know [Cannes] loved the film,” Campillo, 61, tells me in Curzon’s offices. “I sent a message to Thierry Fremaux that if he liked it, like he said he did, it’s important that this film – which shines a light on the forgotten history between Madagascar and France – should be at a big festival in France. He answered me about having a cruel choice to make, but he never answered about Madagascar. It was like my argument was pointless. Then, in the newspapers, there were no articles about colonialism in Madagascar. It’s embarrassing. It is, again, forgotten.”

Campillo, though, knows Madagascar very well. In the early 1970s, the director grew up with his family on a military base in Madagascar, an island that gained independence from France in 1960 but still had the French army watching over them. In Red Island, Campillo’s stand-in is eight-year-old Thomas (Charlie Vauselle), a mischievous boy who dresses up as a female superhero, Fantômette, and roams the neighbourhood at night. Through a childlike perspective, Thomas gradually learns of the warped racial dynamics surrounding him, and how his parents (Quim Gutiérrez and Nadia Tereszkiewicz) are living their own white-privilege fantasy.

Edited hypnotically with musical match cuts and dream sequences, Red Island eschews a traditional plot and is more of a memory piece in the style of Amarcord. Thomas’ fertile imagination – a preview of Campillo’s own future as a filmmaker – is evident in his adventures as Fantômette, while the film’s woozy rhythm mimics more the playfulness of Thomas’ mother than his macho father. Does Thomas dress as a girl because he identifies more with the island’s empathetic women than with the hardened, male Army soldiers?

“Yes,” says Campillo. “What’s weird is that, in France, no one asked me this question about gender, or why he imagines himself as a female heroine. For me, when I was young, I was queer already. I had this feeling that I had to resist the masculinity of a place like a military base.” The director describes how he imagined men manipulating his reality from behind a curtain. “The freedom in Thomas’ life is closer to his mother’s. Their relationship is based on dreaming and escaping the world. When I was child, masculinity was like an evil presence. I didn’t know what my father was doing, but we were in the middle of the military all the time. For me, Thomas had to wear a woman’s outfit to get to the other side of the military base, and to discover that it’s all an act – the ‘happiness’ of colonialism.”

And the disguise is a way for Thomas to explore his queerness without directly upsetting his father? “Exactly,” says Campillo. “The father doesn’t know about this outfit. But the mother gives him stockings. That scene is like an outing. It’s like the mother says to him, ‘I know who you are.’ There, it’s not so obvious. But when I was a child, I knew I was gay. I knew exactly I was gay. I had this feeling. We forget how quickly the closet comes when you have a queer childhood. But she accepts him.”

Throughout Red Island, tiny details seem so specific, they’re surely true. Even the more outlandish details such as Thomas’ father buying baby crocodiles for his family as pets are, in fact, drawn from Campillo’s childhood. A visual motif of skydivers sums it up: the camera is parachuting through the director’s memories. Then again, Campillo has delved into his past in previous films, too. In 1992, the director joined the AIDS activist group ACT UP; the era inspired, indirectly, his zombie feature They Came Back and more directly 120 BPM.

“I did [Red Island] because I did BPM before,” says Campillo. “BPM was about going from the 80s to the 90s. In the 80s, in France, a lot of gay men were afraid to talk about the epidemic. It was this moment when we decided, all together, to start talking and struggling against the silence. You decided you’re not a victim of this epidemic. And with [Red Island], you go from the 60s to the 70s. For French people, it was the end of Les Trente Glorieuses. It was the last place where it was possible for pure colonialism to exist, even if the island was independent at the time.”

“When people don’t do anything when something horrible is happening, that’s horrible. Indifference is the first political force in every country” – Robin Campillo

To emphasise his intent, Campillo originally titled the film Vazaha, a reference to what the Malagasy people called the French: “the whites”. After some concern from his distributor and producers, Campillo altered the name to Red Island. “It would have been a scandal in France to call it The Whites,” he says. “I regret it a little bit. We were vazaha. We were exactly as the Malagasy saw us… France likes to think that it’s colour-blind. France is like, ‘We don’t have a problem with racism.’ But we have a very racist police, and it’s always more violent with people from Africa. It’s connected to this colonial history that we didn’t process totally.”

Campillo teases some details about his next film, Alpha House, a sci-fi about a 90-year-old woman who’s manipulated by a “small, very muscled guy who pushes her to do the last stupid things in her life, even sexual things, and tries to help her go through death”. He’s also keen for Red Island to spark more discussion about France’s colonial past – even if he’s still lamenting the lack of press coverage in France itself.

“I was sad it didn’t help the Malagasy talk about their history, because they’ve been in a very bad political moment for many years, and it’s difficult for them,” says Campillo. “They missed a chance, the [French] newspapers. When I did BPM, there were articles about AIDS – five pages, 10 pages – in newspapers and magazines. People have a right to not like the film, but they could have done a job around the film – there’s been nothing about Madagascar.”

With Red Island, were France not so willing to confront their own racist history? “I don’t know,” says Campillo. “I think it’s more cruel: it’s really indifference. For French people, colonialism is mostly Algeria, and the rest is a little forgotten. With the AIDS epidemic, it’s not like people were hoping for gays to die – they didn’t care, mostly. When people don’t do anything when something horrible is happening, that’s horrible. Indifference is the first political force in every country.”

Red Island is out in UK cinemas and on Curzon Home Cinema from March 1