Skip to main content
Apolonia, Apolonia film image

Apolonia, Apolonia

This event has passed

Canadian Premiere

A dazzling whirlwind, Apolonia Sokol seemingly lives an enchanted life: as the daughter of actor parents, she is surrounded by poets, artists, and intellectuals, and lives in a vast Parisian building home to an experimental theatre company. She puts on plays, hosts dinner parties for bohemians, and opens her dilapidated home to exiled Ukranian feminist activists. Apolonia is charming, captivating, and is the center of her social circle, switching effortlessly between French, English, Danish and Polish. She also happens to be an immensely talented artist with singular vision and drive.

Filming over 13 years, director Lea Glob follows the young French painter and chronicles her intense struggles to succeed in the patriarchal and capitalist art world. Apolonia, Apolonia is joyful, inspiring, and intimate; it is a portrait of the vibrant, charismatic force that is Apolonia, but is also a remarkable document of the friendship and creative interplay between the filmmaker and her subject.

The absorbingly intimate portrait of an artist as a young woman over the transformative span of 13 years.
Screen International

 

Presented by

Series Media Partner

Community Partner

Director
Cast

Apolonia Sokol, Oksana Shachko, Lea Glob

Credits
Country of Origin

Denmark/Poland

Year

2023

Series

Portraits

Language

In Danish, English, French with English subtitles

Film Contact
Content Warning

Self Harm, Suicide

18+
116 min
Art, Music & Photography Documentary Women Directors

Book Tickets

This event has passed.

Credits

Producer

Sidsel Siersted

Cinematography

Lea Glob

Editor

Andreas Bøggild Monies,Thor Ochsnerb

Original Music

Jonas Struck

Director

Lea Glob headshot

Lea Glob

Lea Glob was born in Mariager, Denmark. Her debut documentary, Olmo & The Seagull (2015), was co-directed alongside Petra Costa. The film won the Young Jury Prize at Locarno, as well as Best Nordic Dox at CPH:DOX. Afterwards, Glob co-directed Venus (2016) with Mette Carla Albrechtsen. The film premiered in IDFA’s First Appearance Competition and won the audience award in IndieLisboa IIFF. Apolonia, Apolonia (2023) is the director’s first documentary feature as a solo-director.

Filmography: Olmo & The Seagull (2015); Venus (2016)

Missing VIFF? Check out what's playing at the VIFF Centre

My Father's Glory

Dir. Yves Robert
110 min

Yves Robert's bucolic adaptation of the first memoir by Marcel Pagnol, a loving evocation of a childhood summer holiday in the mountains of Provence, a time when the ten-year-old author fell in love with nature.

VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema

Peter Hujar's Day

Dir. Ira Sachs
76 min

Ben Whishaw is extraordinary in this conjuring trick of a movie from Ira Sachs (Passages), a minimalist masterpiece recreating a conversation between New York photographer Hujar and writer Linda Rosenkrantz in 1974.

VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre

Caravaggio

Dir. David Bickerstaff & Phil Grabsky
100 min

In the latest from Exhibition on Screen, co-directors David Bickerstaff and Phil Grabsky shed light not only on Caravaggio's paintings, but his life, often kept half-hidden in the same chiaroscuro tones he shaded his masterpieces with.

VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre

Jay Kelly

Dir. Noah Baumbach
130 min

In Noah Baumbach's wise and witty comedy, George Clooney plays Jay Kelly, a world-famous movie star touring Europe with his friend and manager, Ron (Adam Sandler). Faced with nagging dissatisfaction, Jay starts to ask himself some tough questions.

VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema

Orwell: 2+2=5

Dir. Raoul Peck
119 min

Oscar-nominated director Raoul Peck reimagines 1984 in this urgent essay on power, language, and control. With narration by Damian Lewis, it’s a chilling portrait of how Orwell’s warnings became our reality.

VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema

Put Your Soul On Your Hand and Walk

Dir. Sepideh Farsi
113 min

A joyous and heartrending introduction to 25-year-old Palestinian photographer and artist Fatma Hassona, living under siege in Gaza.

VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre