Un rêve plus long que la nuit

A debauched, exuberant French art fairytale stuns all over again in a luscious new 4K restoration.

Sweet little Camélia drifts off to sleep wondering what it would be like to be grown-up. She awakens in a colourful dream-world run by a dragon, where a sorceress transforms her into a gorgeous woman. Now, she must open the Seven Doors of Mystery to find love … except behind some of these doors are a man selling death, a scary king who demands her as his bride and a mistress offering her sex work. By the time giant phalluses are exploding at the orgy in spurts of glitter and feathers, Camélia is learning the lesson of all fairytales: be careful what you wish for.

None other than the House of Dior funded this lavish restoration from the original 16mm negatives, which reinstates this avant-garde classic’s original 1976 edit and preserves its synth soundtrack by counterculture king Peter Whitehead. Self-taught multidisciplinary artist Niki de Saint Phalle survived a terrible childhood of physical and sexual abuse; her first film, Daddy (1972), exorcised these horrors. This second film – which stars her daughter Laura Duke Condominas as the adult Camélia, alongside the director herself and several friends – poetically explores female coming-of-age from a mother’s perspective in a more carnivalesque, hopeful way.

“In this sumptuous film, the kitsch and the sexual collide … Rage, sex, childhood, and joy all bubbled in the same rainbow cauldron.” – Screen Slate