"Apolonia, Apolonia" follows an aspiring painter through her struggles

Danish director Lea Glob reports that during a 2009 Skype call Apolonia Sokol captured her attention with a composed, mesmerizing presence. Studying in the Danish Film School, required to complete a film project, Glob embarked on what later became a thirteen year collaboration resulting in the two hour documentary “Apolonia, Apolonia” revealing the daunting challenges to becoming a successful painter. 

With art always a difficult career to pursue, Apolonia, often called Api, forged an even more problematic pathway as she undertook reimagining patriarchally dominated portraiture, most notably representations of the female body. Initially, in this endeavor, Oksana Shachko, friend and founder of the feminist action group Femen, encouraged Api in her studies at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris and in attempts to secure prestigious exhibitions and financial support thereafter.

Chronologically, the narrative, at times with voiceover narration, follows Apolonia’s peripatetic days living in her father’s rundown warehouse theater in Paris to Copenhagen, visiting relatives in Belarus and Poland, moving from Istanbul to New York, Los Angeles to Rome. Described in a press notes interview as a complex combination of  “courageous and desperate at the same time,” Apolonia exudes an uncommon appeal. Complementing Apolonia’s nonconformist trajectory, director Lea Glob includes archival footage and gradually turns the camera on herself, a woman filmmaker in male dominated world and facing her own life-or-death moment.

However, the patchwork quilt of “Apolonia, Apolonia” becomes frayed—connections occasionally awkward, informative details often lacking. I empathize with both these women’s Herculean trials—to achieve success in the art world and in the film world—but, frankly, I felt unengaged, a spectator rather than a fellow traveler. In French and Danish with English subtitles, “Apolonia, Apolonia” screens at Webster University’s Winifred Moore auditorium Friday, April 12, through Sunday, April 14, at 7:30 each of those evenings. For more information, you may visit the film series website.