The question of what it takes for women to live a creative life, and what is at stake, is at the heart of Danish filmmaker Lea Glob’s Apolonia, Apolonia (2022). Chiefly a portrait of French figurative painter Apolonia Sokol, but extending its thematic net beyond straightforward biography, the ambitious, sprawling documentary was filmed over thirteen years across multiple cities (mainly Paris, New York, Los Angeles and Copenhagen). Glob, who is also very much in the frame, started shooting Sokol in 2009 as a film school assignment, when the young French artist was living in the Lavoir Moderne Parisien, a ramshackle performing arts theatre in Paris that her parents founded in a nineteenth-century bathhouse. In a voiceover narration prone to sink into cliché, the director describes the Lavoir’s lively community as just how she’d imagined Bohemia to be, far from her own Danish countryside upbringing. But any concern that the film will be limited to a wide-eyed portrait of an underground Parisian art scene romanticised as a free utopia quickly dissipates. Instead a multi-layered, intensely felt and complex examination of Sokol and several of the women she is closest to emerges. As they seek a sense of home and purpose in an often hostile environment, the documentary becomes as much about migration and marginalisation as it is about artistic self-expression, with the latter a life-raft that does not always stay afloat. Especially given its up-close insight into several familiar names within the worlds of art and activism, the film should find ready spots at festivals and possibly streaming.
Progressing more or less chronologically, the film sets up Sokol’s early upbringing as unstable. But it was a relative haven of avant-garde authenticity, which she feels increasingly cut off from as she graduates Beaux-Artes, an influential art school on the “posh” side of the Seine, to the Lavoir. She struggles to come into her own as a painter in a commercialised American art milieu of shark-like market players and sell-out celebrity. Early home Beta tapes show Apolonia’s parents in happier times (in a typical rejection of bourgeois propriety, they even film her conception for posterity), before their divorce, experienced by Apolonia as world-shattering, forces the eight-year-old and her mother out on their own. A grown Apolonia, charismatically free-spirited but dedicated to forging a career, moves back into the theatre at a time of aggressive gentrification. Her father Hervé, a French painter, tries, ultimately fruitlessly, to safeguard the building — adding to a theme of creative freedom under threat that permeates the film on many levels. But more central is Apolonia’s continued close relationship with her Polish mother. The daughter of Belarussian exiles, she fled the Communist Bloc with a Danish tourist. Her past marked by repeated traumatic expulsions has inspired some of Apolonia’s artwork.
Also featuring prominently is Oksana Shachko, a member of Femen, the Ukrainian anti-patriarchal activists who became global celebrities for their topless protests (she eyerolls at a glossy photo of herself in a fashion magazine). Apolonia takes her in, reminded of her mother’s flight to Paris. Her hands still recovering from being broken by Russian intelligence agents, Shachko is accepted into Beaux-Artes, where she develops icon paintings subverting the imagery of the Orthodox Church. “Art and creation and no babies” is the only way to survive in a patriarchal world, she half-jokes at a Christmas gathering. Her eventual suicide lends devastating weight. Proximity to death comes as a traumatic time of reevaluation for director Glob, too, after she nearly dies in childbirth and must undergo 36 surgical procedures which leave her barely able to pick up a camera.
Apolonia’s stint in the States critiques of a cynical, opportunistic artworld in her encounter with the art collector Stefan Simchowitz. Infamous for his Faustian bargains with penniless artists to accumulate their work (The New York Times profiled him as “the art world’s patron Satan”), he provides her with a studio and materials and installs himself in charge of her career. The strain of becoming packaged into an “industrial product”, and pushed to more than double her monthly output of paintings, leaves Apolonia feeling dehumanised. Simchowitz’s reputation for shallowness and hype is confirmed, as he constantly instructs Sokol to pose for Instagram shots. She reluctantly humours him until a crisis develops over her painting becoming lifeless. An art critic warns her she’s in danger of selling out, which prompts her to decamp back to the “Old World” of Europe, and her first big solo show in Istanbul in 2018.
A genuine belief in art as a means to interrogate bodily politics and relieve the alienation of the outsider is evident in all the women here, who through art try to navigate their place in a world not designed for them, while absorbing exacting costs.
Director, Cinematographer, Screenwriter: Lea Glob
Voiceover writer: Andreas Bøggild Monies
Editing: Andreas Bøggild Monies, Thor Ochsner
Producer: Sidsel Siersted
Sound Design: Anna Zarnecka-Wojcik
Music: Jonas Struck
Production companies: Danish Documentary Production (Denmark), Staron Film (Poland)
Sales: CAT&Docs
Venue: IDFA
In Polish, French, Danish
116 minutes
