Multi-disciplinary artist Niki de Saint Phalle’s second feature is a whimsical coming-of-age fairy tale. It stars her daughter Laura Duke Condominas in the role of Camélia, a young princess who was magically transformed into an adult and embarks on a journey towards womanhood. Encountering enchanted beings and frightful creatures in a surrealistic landscape—at times tinged with Jean Tinguely’s fantastical machines, and later featuring a beautifully animated sequence by Saint Phalle—Camélia navigates the hazardous terrain of patriarchy and experiences her first encounters with sex, death, and chaos. As director, mother, animator, and chief world-creator, Saint Phalle imagines a marvellous new world for emancipated girls and women, one in which happy endings can come true. 

Niki de Saint Phalle is one of the featured artists in the M+ exhibition Dream Rooms: Environments by Women Artists 1950s–Now.

Niki de Saint Phalle (1930–2002) was a French American multi-disciplinary artist, writer, and film director. She was celebrated for her depiction of the colourful frolicking female character ‘Nanas’ that usually appears in the form of paintings and sculptures. Saint Phalle also created videos, moving image projects, and performance documentation, and appeared as the subject of numerous documentary portraits. Her work often examines notions of childhood, femininity, gender oppression, violence, and joy. In collaboration with filmmaker Peter Whitehead, Saint Phalle directed her first feature-length film, Daddy (1973), exploring the subject of familial trauma. She also made the poetic feminist fairytale Un rêve plus long que la nuit (A Dream Longer Than the Night) (1976).