Imperial Princess

Iulia lives alone in Monaco since her father returned to Russia due to sanctions against their country. She no longer attends school. She feels increasingly lonely and threatened. Framed as a video diary shot by its protagonist on her smartphone, Vernier’s film has the air of a 21st century fairytale, with Monaco’s gilded cage both its setting and its symbolic subject. A dreamily drifting nihilistic contemporary fable, transforming the conditions of the present into a fiction of the real with an economy of means and formal invention.