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

Happy Feet

Dir. George Miller
168 min

A tap-dancing penguin named Mumble can't sing like the others, but his unique skill may save his colony. Happy Feet is a music-filled adventure that celebrates courage, friendship, staying true to yourself, and is a perfect icy break this summer!

VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema

Ghosts of the Sea

97 min

Imagine an especially poetic true crime podcast about a sailor who built his own sailboat and lived on the high seas, but lost not one, but two wives along the way... Now imagine it told from the vantage point of his daughter: Ghosts of the Sea.

VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema

Apocalypse in the Tropics

Dir. Petra Costa
110 min

An Academy Award nominee for Edge of Democracy, Petra Costa returns with a fascinating take on how the Evangelical movement has taken Brazil by storm and worked with the right to undermine the constitutional separation of Church and State.

VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema

Oldboy

Dir. Park Chan-wook
120 min

The second movie in Park's Vengeance Trilogy. Choi Min-sik stars as Dae Su, inexplicably held captive by he-knows-not-who for 15 years, and then, just as inexplicably, released. Not surprisingly, after all this time, he has only one thing on his mind...

VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema
Vancouver Mysteries Presents... Murder at the Movies
black and white photo of a man in a trench coat and trilby hat standing against a brick wall

Vancouver Mysteries Presents... Murder at the Movies

95 min

This summer, enter the world of film noir with a new immersive murder mystery blending elements of film with live performance and audience participation. This show turns the VIFF Centre into a crime scene and you, the audience, into detectives.

VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema
Georgia O'Keeffe: the Brightness of Light
Georgia O’Keeffe: The Brightness of Light film image; painted reds, pinks, oranges, and yellows that combine to look like a flower

Georgia O'Keeffe: the Brightness of Light

Dir. Paul Wagner
118 min

Drawing on her copious correspondence and the world's leading scholars, this is a definitive documentary on the life and work of "the mother of American Modernism."

VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre
More info

Sold Out