Empire

Empire (Viften, 2023) is a Danish-Swedish-Spanish historical drama you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Frederikke Aspöck and starring Anna Neye Poulsen and Sara Fanta Traore. Saint Croix, Danish West Indies, summer of 1848. Anna, a "free colored" woman of some means, owns property and a household — including Petrine, her enslaved closest friend.

Anna is also the companion of the colony's governor-general Peter von Scholten. Over elaborate dinner tables fanned by an enslaved boy, the two discuss reform while a rebellion quietly assembles in the cane fields. The film is drawn toward the real historical rupture that followed: on July 3, 1848, under pressure from the uprising, von Scholten declared the emancipation of all enslaved people in the Danish West Indies.

Aspöck places the film's moral weight on a woman trapped inside the colonial order she also perpetuates — a precise and unsettling angle that sweeping period dramas rarely take. Stream Empire online on iFILM.