Danish filmmaker Lea Glob’s portrait of artist Apolonia Sokol, shot over 13 years, is a chronicle not only of friendship, struggle, pain and success, it is very much a record of seismic political and cultural change, as viewed across society or, in the case of Apolonia, within the arts. “It’s about making room for new living people in the world, instead of celebrating all the dead guys,” Glob says of Apolonia’s impact, specifically in the field of painting.
It is also a story in which some of life’s core themes are forefronted, sometimes joyously, at other times tragically, even graphically on occasion. Apolonia’s artistic parents filmed their only child’s conception and birth, scenes which find ongoing thematic counterpoint in Apolonia’s 13-year immersion into the art world, and director Lea Glob’s development into a filmmaker of high standing. And then there is death or near-death, which Apolonia and Lea are forced to confront when a core protagonist within the film dies, or following the birth of Lea’s daughter when the new mother was rendered comatose and had to endure 36 surgical procedures, including the removal of her uterus and ovaries.
But throughout the film it is the fascinating, talented, vulnerable yet explosive Apolonia who dominates, framed within the majority of scenes as she progresses towards international recognition as an artist, sometimes with uncertainty but always on an upward trajectory, sharing her life with her beloved Oksana Schachko (co-founder of Femen) and building her career across Paris, Copenhagen, New York and LA.
All the time Lea is there to record events. “Bye Lea, bye camera,” Apolonia says at one point towards the end of the film, before the bed-ridden director trains the camera on her own reflection in a mirror, still exhausted after the trauma of her post-natal illness.
On Apolonia Apolonia, Glob takes a full directing credit. Her previous films, Olmo and the Seagull and Venus, were co-directed with Petra Costa and Mette Carla Albrechtsen respectively, experiences which were both instructive and invigorating. “I learned a lot from working with Petra,” she tells of her experience on Olmo. “She had a different take that kind of liberated things for me also because I was taught in a more northern European fashion. But both the French and Italian poetry that came from Olivia and Serge (the film’s protagonists) and the traditions of theatre, and Petra’s poetic approach to society, were very liberating.” She refers to the process of helping to shape Olmo and the Seagull and Venus in the edit suite as “the education you have after your education.”
This time, however, Glob was on her own on a project (a word, incidentally, that Apolonia hates) she nurtured since film school. That said, she acknowledges the rich technical and artistic contribution of colleagues and collaborators. “I depended so deeply on the musicality of both the composer and the editors,” she says.
As Glob told Business Doc Europe before the film’s world premiere at IDFA 2022, she was aware that timing was crucial in terms of when to put the camera down and draw her film to a close. There were numerous potential end points, but Apolonia’s rise to prominence and the director’s recovery from illness in 2021 were key determinants. “She [Apolonia] said to me, ‘Lea, I can’t anymore. I need to live my life without a lens.’ And then I answered her that I also needed to live life not behind the camera. Emotionally it was a good ending.”
She further reflects on the film a year after its world premiere, having picked up at least 15 major prizes including Best Film at IDFA 2022.
“We were young, completely ambitious artists,” says Glob. “I still watch it with love and a little bit with a thrill of knowing [Apolonia]. It’s really a rollercoaster in a way, and that was important – to get people sucked into that…Of course, there are many things that we lived and experienced together that I would have loved to also put in the film, but I am kind of happy that we kept the emotional level at the forefront and this ride of being an artist and being young.”
She notes as well how Apolonia has closed the circle on previous male artists (“all of these old masters”) who occupied the artistic spaces that she now dominates. As we see in the film, in 2020 she was made a laureate of the Academy of France in Rome and won a prestigious artistic residency at the Villa Medicis in 2020–2021.
“When I said at the beginning of the film that she’s walking in the footsteps of the great painters, she is very literally now an artist painting in Picasso’s old studio actually in Paris,” Glob says. “Now she opens the windows to tourists and says, ‘Picasso’s not here, but I am.’”
The filmmaker’s next documentary project derives from the life-threatening illness she suffered after the birth of her son and the state system that both threatened and saved her life. “I had this experience very much with my own body to be in a position where all you can receive is help from others,” Glob tells BDE of the new documentary project, titled How I Lived and Died in the Welfare State.
“I really experienced the Danish welfare system and equality in a very physical way. I experienced the moment when it crumbled and minutes later I experienced it at its peak, at its height, where you have no expense spared on saving any life. You don’t have any insurance questions, you just get the best treatment. And in Europe now, we are cutting down on everything. Like I say, I experienced the best and the worst of the welfare state,” Glob ends.
