Chocolat

Chocolat (1988) is Claire Denis's debut drama, available to watch online on iFILM. She drew the film straight from her own childhood in late-colonial Cameroon.

A grown French woman returns to Cameroon and remembers herself as a girl named France. Her world back then was a colonial administrator's household near the end of empire: a father forever away on the road, a restless mother, and the person who mattered most to the child — Protée, the family's African houseboy. Between her mother and Protée hangs a silent, forbidden charge the girl senses but cannot put a name to.

Raised in Africa herself, Denis makes no lecture of this — only slow, sensual cinema about race, power and a closeness that can never be acted on. Isaach de Bankolé plays Protée almost wordlessly, on dignity and restraint alone. It rewards viewers who prize mood and subtext over plot. Stream Chocolat (1988) online on iFILM.