A Little Princess

A Little Princess (1995) is Alfonso Cuaron's family fantasy drama that you can watch online on iFILM. A girl raised in colonial India is torn from her father and shut away in a strict New York boarding school.

Sara Crewe (Liesel Matthews) grows up on luxury and bedtime tales until the First World War pulls her father to the front. Frances Burnett's old London setting moves across the ocean here, to a school run by the icy Miss Minchin (Eleanor Bron), where imagination gets punished and kindness reads as weakness. When word comes that her father has died, Sara is dropped to scullery work in the attic. Yet the stories she keeps telling warm more than just herself, holding everyone around her afloat.

Cuaron shoots the film like a picture book come to life: deep saturated color, Indian legends of Rama, and the liquid light of cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki. Years before Harry Potter, the director already knew how to speak to children about loss without talking down. Stream A Little Princess (1995) online on iFILM.