“This Work is a Product of Survival”: Lea Glob on Tribeca 2023 Premiere Apolonia, Apolonia

Premiering in international competition at last year’s IDFA, where it took top prize, Lea Glob’s (2015’s Olmo and The Seagull) Apolonia, Apolonia is an intense character study of French figurative painter Apolonia Sokol. The Danish director met the artist, who is of Danish and Polish descent, while searching for the protagonist of her first doc while attending the Danish Film School, and then trailed her for the next 13 years. And while the bohemian free spirit, who was raised in a Paris underground theater founded by her eccentric parents (an old VHS tape Apolonia discovers comes with the written warning not to view before she turns 18, though watching one’s conception is arguably inappropriate at any age), is the star, Glob herself is also a main character, albeit mostly through the doc’s poetic narration. Indeed, the film is just as much about the evolving relationship between these two strong and vulnerable women on opposite sides of the lens as it is a “portrait of an artist.” And yet it’s also clearly a mash note from Glob to Apolonia, which likewise renders Apolonia, Apolonia a highly subjective, oftentimes rose-colored-glasses portrayal — transparently so. As Glob herself admits from the start, “No motif has ever caught my eye as she did.” Apolonia is this director’s muse and the film literally a cinematic following of one’s muse, no matter how long it takes, or to the unorthodox places — physical, psychological, emotional — such a journey might lead. Just prior to the doc’s Tribeca debut Filmmaker reached out to Glob to learn all about the passionate multiyear project, and the soaring highs and tragic lows of life itself she grew from along the way.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.