Synopsis
Director: Lea Glob
Producer: Sidsel Lønvig Siersted
Denmark, Poland, 116 minutes, 2023
A portrait of the artist as a young woman, Apolonia Apolonia is among the year’s most celebrated and fascinating documentaries. Shortlisted for this year’s Academy Awards and winner of top prizes at festivals around the world, the film follows 13 years in the life of charismatic French painter Apolonia Sokol, from her days as a bohemian student at the Beaux-Arts de Paris, to her travails as a millionaire-sponsored artist in Los Angeles and beyond. “Bittersweet [and] “beguiling” (New York Times), “astonishing [and] affectionate” (RogerEbert.com) and “an impressively idiosyncratic, far-reaching work” (Variety), the film charts Apolonia’s winding course through the (often male-dominated) art-world and her close relationships with two other women, her best friend Ukrainian feminist activist Oksana Shachko, and the documentary’s director Lea Glob. As she reveals profound questions about female identity and friendship, art and commerce, filmmaker and protagonist, life and death, Glob is “utterly captivated by her subject, and the result leaves us just as transfixed” (POV Magazine).
