Rose Island

Rel­a­tive­ly ear­ly in 2020, one video game became a phe­nom­e­non as Nin­ten­do Switch play­ers looked to sim­u­late some sort of struc­tured exis­tence in the con­text of quar­an­tine. Ani­mal Cross­ing: New Hori­zons sees your cus­tomis­able char­ac­ter move to a desert­ed island, dec­o­rat­ing the place and devel­op­ing it into a com­mu­ni­ty of anthro­po­mor­phic ani­mal res­i­dents. Sell­ing the most units of any title in 2020, it has already cracked the top 30 list of the best-sell­ing video games of all time.

All the spe­cif­ic fac­tors for Ani­mal Crossing’s suc­cess would mer­it a deep-dive arti­cle, but one thing appears clear: with the world in the grip of a pan­dem­ic, vague­ly whim­si­cal explo­rations of form­ing start-up com­mu­ni­ties dur­ing a peri­od of glob­al unrest are hot right now. By sheer luck of tim­ing, Syd­ney Sibilia’s Rose Island, based on the real-life sto­ry of an island being cre­at­ed and bring­ing peo­ple togeth­er, looks set to cap­i­talise on this.

In 1967, eccen­tric Ital­ian engi­neer Gior­gio Rosa (played here by Elio Ger­mano) designed and financed the con­struc­tion of a 400-square-metre man-made plat­form, sup­port­ed by sev­er­al steel pylons sus­pend­ed 26 metres above the seabed, locat­ed in the Adri­at­ic Sea just short of sev­en miles off the coast of the Ital­ian province of Rim­i­ni. As the plat­form was built ever so slight­ly beyond Ital­ian ter­ri­to­r­i­al waters, it was out­side the con­trol of the authorities.

Rosa sought to build a microna­tion as a sym­bol of free­dom, and, with the help of col­lab­o­ra­tors, fur­nished the plat­form with com­mer­cial estab­lish­ments like a restau­rant, bar and night­club. Amid a back­drop of world­wide protests and wars rag­ing on, Rosa’s oper­a­tion became a hotspot for young peo­ple seek­ing plea­sure and free­dom. In June 1968, the plat­form declared inde­pen­dence under the Esperan­to name ​‘Insu­lo de la Rozoj’, fur­ther fuelling rage from the Ital­ian gov­ern­ment who viewed the island as a ploy to get mon­ey from tourists while avoid­ing nation­al tax­a­tion, also con­sid­er­ing it a poten­tial threat to nation­al security.

This light­ly fic­tion­alised film opens in Novem­ber 1968 in Stras­bourg, with Rosa hav­ing trav­elled in a vehi­cle he designed him­self to make a case for the island’s exis­tence as a ​‘head of state’. Jump­ing back and forth in time until events catch up to this fram­ing device, Rose Island is a breezi­ly enter­tain­ing watch through­out. Pro­duc­tion val­ues, per­haps due to Netflix’s back­ing, are par­tic­u­lar­ly strong, with the recre­ation of the island – shot in an infin­i­ty pool in Mal­ta in much shal­low­er water – a gen­uine­ly impres­sive feat of design and engineering.

For­mal­ly though, what stands out most about Rose Island is how it appears to have been inspired by, of all films, The Walk, Robert Zemeck­is’ big-bud­get 3D retelling of Philipe Petit’s high-wire walk between the Twin Tow­ers of the World Trade Cen­ter. Both films share a sim­i­lar tone and sense of humour, as well as a heist movie-style fram­ing for their grand finales and assem­bling of key crew. The cin­e­matog­ra­phy and stag­ing of the con­struc­tion of the island, too, seem tai­lored for a 3D release the film will nev­er have.