Apolonia Apolonia

A film by Lea Glob proposed by Elvire Duvelle-Charles, founder of the feminist film club Tonnerre

For one evening, Les Abattoirs will be hosting the feminist film club Tonnerre and its founder Elvire Duvelle-Charles for a special screening of the film "Apolonia Apolonia" by Lea Glob, about the artist Apolonia Sokol.

When Danish director Lea Glob began filming the painter Apolonia Sokol, it was intended to be nothing more than a film school exercise. In the end, the filmed portrait took thirteen years to develop into an intimate, meandering epic, that of a young woman artist, from her bohemian life at the heart of her parents' Lavoir Moderne theatre in Paris, through her studies at the Beaux-Arts in Paris, to her rise in the contemporary art world. But in a mirror image of Apolonia, the destinies of Okasana Shachko, one of the founders of Femen, and of the director, also take shape. A sorority with three faces, putting the patriarchal world to the test.

"It's interesting to note that Apolonia also has a way of challenging taboos (and my taboos). And maybe that's the real reason I couldn't leave her. I had to grow as a person to complete this film, on the outside. Sexuality, grief, love, ambition, doubt, relationships with suicide and religion, she questioned everything. In the end, that's what I'm most proud of in this film. We don't evade taboos, we bring them to the fore, and I hope we do so with care". Lea Glob

Since September 2022, the ciné-club Tonnerre has been organising one film screening a month (at the Majestic Bastille, an independent cinema in Paris) followed by a conversation between the director of the work being shown and someone with expertise in the subject represented, to bring a feminist perspective to the darkened auditorium. "These discussions are the main raison d'être of Tonnerre. The film is first and foremost an excuse to get together, discuss and rethink the world", explains the founder of the initiative, Elvire Duvelle-Charles, journalist, former Femen, co-founder of the Clit Revolution movement (an Instagram community for sex and intimacy education, now a France TV Slash documentary series), author and co-host of the Hot Line sex podcast.

This is the backdrop to the screening of Lea Glob's film Apolonia, Apolonia, which won Best International Feature Film at the IDFA festival in November 2023. The film has been shortlisted to represent Denmark at the Oscars in 2023, and has won over 30 international awards.

The film will be released on 27 March 2024.

Apolonia Sokol
Born in Paris in 1988, Apolonia Sokol is a French painter of Danish and Polish origin. After graduating from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, she moved to the United States and settled in New York, where she worked in DanColen's studio. She then moved to Los Angeles, where she befriended other artists and painters with whom she began an ongoing conversation about figurative painting.

Apolonia Sokol is known for her political stance on portraiture, asserting the need to use it as a tool for empowerment and for deconstructing marginalisation and domination. This is why she tackles a wide range of issues such as feminism, homosexuality, the representation of women in art history and body politics in general.

Apolonia Sokol has exhibited her work in Copenhagen, Brussels, Paris, Istanbul, Mexico City, Rome and Los Angeles, and her work has been included in institutional exhibitions such as: Tainted Love / Club Edit at Villa Arson in 2019, Aux sources des années 1980, at Musée de l'Abbaye Sainte-Croix, Sables d'Olonne, in 2019, Mademoiselle at Crac Occitanie in 2018 Tainted Love, inaugural exhibition at Confort Moderne in 2017, Peindre, dit-elle at Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dole in 2017.

In 2020, the artist will benefit from a one-year residency at the Villa Médicis. Recent exhibitions include Possessed at MOCO, Conversation Piece VII Verso Narragonia at the Fondazione Memmo in Rome, Women Painting Women at The Modern, Forth Worth, Texas, USA.

The Arken Museum (Denmark) is devoting a major solo exhibition to her (October 2023 - February 2024).

Lea Glob
She graduated as a director from the National Film School of Denmark in 2011 with the short film MEETING MY FATHER- KASPER TOPHAT, in which the director tackles her origins in a story with a strange fictional form. She then co-directed OLMO & LA MOUETTE with Petra Costa in 2014. In 2016, she co-directed the feature documentary VENUS with Mette Carla Albrechtsen, about sexuality from a female perspective.

Credits
Writer & director: Lea Glob
Production: Sidsel Siersted for Danish Documentary Production
Co-production: Malgorzata Staron for Staron Film
Cinematography: Lea Glob
Editing: Andreas Bøggil Monies, Thor Ochsner
Sound design : Anna Żarnecka-Wójcik
Music: Jonas Struck
TV channels: HBO Max, ARTE - G.E.I.E., AVRO-TROS, DR, SVT, YLE, VGTV
Screening copy: Danish Documentary Production
Distribution : Survivance