My interview with Danish filmmaker Lea Glob happened at just the right time. During our interview about her Oscar short-listed documentary, “Apolonia, Apolonia,” we talked about how the questions of work and motherhood take up a lot of space in the mind of a woman. There is always that fear of whether motherhood will take us away from the work we’re most passionate about. Are we facing defeat in what we could leave behind once we become mothers?
The film “Apolonia, Apolonia” follows the artist and paintress Apolonia Sokol over the course of a 13-year period. We see her at the start in school at École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, while living in her father’s underground theater house. We then follow Apolonia as she begins her career as a painter, to New York City, Los Angeles, and then back to Europe. During the film, we also meet the late Oksana Shachko, an artist and activist for women’s rights who was forced to exile from her home country in the Ukraine. During the evolution of Apolonia, we also follow the life of the woman behind the camera, Lea Glob.
I loved my conversation with Lea. Along with discussing her work as an artist, and the sustainability of the work, we talked about what drove Lea to keep going on making this film for well over a decade. Her muse Apolonia was one of the main reasons that kept her driven and inspired, but also her team who supported her during the process. The film really saved her life as she had a near-death experience giving birth. Going back to this film and her work as a filmmaker rejuvenated her soul. From hearing about her life experiences during her time of making the film, I felt so encouraged by the end of our talk. I too think about those questions, about career, motherhood, and sustainability. For this conversation, I am grateful.
“Apolonia, Apolonia,” has been Shortlisted for Best Documentary Feature Film at the 96th Academy Awards®, and has been acquired by Grasshopper Film and DOCUMENTARY+ The documentary opened at DCTV’s Firehouse Cinema in NYC on Friday, January 12.
What brought you to this project and why did you choose Apolonia as your subject?
When I was young, I applied to the National Film School of Denmark. It’s a traditional Danish film school, and it’s very hard to get accepted there. They only took six students every other year. After I was accepted, I was suffering from this imposter syndrome. I still had not proven that I could do a film. I was young and I wasn’t secure at that time that I had the ability to handle the craft. Then we had our first school project that was going to be a documentary short film about an artist. I was so eager to prove myself, and I really wanted to find someone great. I put out this casting call. It was a bit pretentious, and no one really replied to me.
Then a woman I knew wanted to introduce me to one of her friends as a possible subject for the short film. Her name was Apolonia. She just moved back to her father’s underground theater where she grew up in Paris. I was in Copenhagen at the time, and I thought ‘wow, that seems like something that could be a film.’ Then I called up Apolonia on Skype, and we had a conversation. We really just clicked. She was so incredibly charismatic, as you can see in the film. She was intelligent, mysterious, and she was everything. I was like, ‘I have to meet this woman.’
The next day, I took a train to Paris, and she told me, “We can do research on your film here in Paris, my address is 35 rue Lyon.” I had no idea how I would find her, but she said, “when you stand in the street, you just yell out loud, ‘Apolonia, Apolonia,’ and then I’ll throw down the keys.” That’s why the title of the feature film is called “Apolonia, Apolonia.” My short film was called “Apolonia.” Years later, after film school was finished, I told her that I had to do another film with her, and asked her, “Will you please be in another film with me?” She said, “yes,” and so began our journey making “Apolonia, Apolonia.”
I think what really made me love this film ever more was that you put your story into the film. I so appreciated that, especially towards the end with the pregnancy. Can you talk about that choice to bring in your story with Apolonia’s?
This film is really centered on the presentation and how images have meaning in and out of our lives. We are two visual artists, so it’s a perfect part of the film to look at representation, what we are seeing around us, and how we can mirror ourselves. Pregnancy, as you said, is something you don’t see anywhere, and you don’t hear people speak about it. It was so incredibly important to bring my own story into the film, as important as it was to represent Oksana Shachko and Apolonia’s story. The intention was that by sharing our stories, it would transcend not only a portrait of one artist, but the female body we share, and the dilemmas and choices that preoccupy our minds as female artists in this present day. So that was very important.
Yesterday we had a conversation with Kirsten Johnson who did “Cameraperson” about our film. She was really interesting. She asked me questions about this idea of representation and she offered her interpretation too. It was interesting because she said women in the beginning of their lives are objects of beauty, and then when you come to this other phase in life, the idea of motherhood takes over in a special way. Men are not that preoccupied like we are to have children. I don’t know biology, but it’s not proportionally equal to the amount of time that women spend on this question. Like, can I start a family and have a career? It’s a question in our film that is not exactly proportional to the reality of things.
Maybe it’s because we transcend from being the objects of beauty, and then to being this caregiver. What is the reality of this in our lives, but also, how is it represented? As females, we try to find our way in this landscape. I think you see this discussion in the film. I started a family, and I was at the same time feeling I betrayed the arts by choosing that other direction. I now feel that I did not do that at all. But as women, we cannot ignore the fact that the question is there in our minds.
I also wanted to explore through a different perspective, which is going back to representation, how I felt within the healthcare system as a pregnant woman. I really encountered that as a female with a pregnant body, I was listened to less. People see you differently. It’s kind of shocking and really lonely in a way because the body of a pregnant woman changes, and everyone around you has all of these prejudices. In a way, this is how it feels as a minority, but as a white woman, it’s not every day I encounter that.
I know the world of sexism, and the patriarchal world, but still I live in a country where I have full citizenship and full rights. I’m a white woman and I can travel and do all of these things, but still having this pregnant body, I really experienced how dangerous it can be when people don’t listen to you. I think that was what was connected to what I learned from the young Oksana Shachko. She was really fighting for women’s rights. So that all came into the topic of this film, and we were like, ‘how can we not speak about it?’
I love that scene when Apolonia is walking around the sculpture exhibit in LA, and getting her photo taken. She decides to break away from the shoot and strip down. She asks you to take her picture. She seems the most free in that moment. How was it for you doing that scene and what does it mean to you personally?
It was a very defining moment. Before I had been the only one filming her. Then I entered into this business where the access of an artist is a commodity. When I was there, Stefan Simchowitz was taking her photo for Vogue Italia, for his featured column. Apolonia is such an image person, so she really saw how she would be represented in those images, like she was being subdued by this gaze. She really wanted to break out of it. She was calling me, in a way. I realized I had to choose. I was not just doing an observational film anymore, I was actually a part of this world and I should go with Apolonia.
In this film, there were these crossroads. We went to Los Angeles to finish the film because we thought, ‘OK she is going to go to Hollywood and then she will be rich and famous.’ But what we discovered was something completely different. It was like my camera should be a support to her, and not an exploitative one.
What kept you going through the 13 years you were filming Apolonia?
I have dedicated a lot of my life to the art of filmmaking. For twenty years, that’s actually what I have been doing. I did three other feature films during the course of making this documentary. So really, filmmaking has been my profession. Before I met my husband and I started my family, I was kind of married to filmmaking. So I’m very much guilty of this sentence that Apolonia says in the film that there is not really a difference between your life and your work. So for me to get back to my filmmaking after being so sick was so important to me.
Getting back to the film really helped me get better. Apolonia and my team also really helped me. I was lucky to have producers supporting my film for that long of a period, and not shutting it down. Sidsel Lønvig Siersted, who is one of my producers, is also a young woman who is now having kids herself. She knows that it was essential to support my sustainability to do films. So they never lost faith in me, and also my husband was very supportive. I almost died, but I was able to get back to my apartment, and live on. I should be grateful just for that. But in my soul, creation was still so important. Everyone around me recognized that and supported me in going back to the film. So I took a small camera and went back to Apolonia to finish this film. It was a driving force within me that was so strong. And this choice to go back to the film was connected to my wanting to not give up on life.
Also, Apolonia is an artist, and the film follows her process in taking her time and showing how important it was to show that process. In the world where art is also like a commodity, the course of time it takes to make art is expensive. The real fight was to keep on until the work was finished, and to take the time it should take. In a way, it was lucky to do a film about these same subjects.
I had seen so many of my fellow filmmakers being really sad that they spent a lot of time on their film, but they didn’t get the results they desired. I mean it can be a matter of weeks, or six weeks of editing, and then you can get there, but it is an expensive six weeks. What the finished product should look like can only be fully imagined by the director. Sometimes you’re lucky that you can reach what you hoped the end result would be.
For Apolonia, it was important that she got to a place where her life and work were sustainable. Before we could stop shooting the film it was important that she was getting the results that she wanted in her paintings and in her life.
I so appreciated that. You can see how it was worth it to follow her journey to that place. What do you hope people see in your film?
Well, I hope that they will take on this journey. I hope they can see what I saw. And what I saw was the endurance to keep going and document this story. I do feel that I have met some of our generation’s most important artists and that I met them at a period when it was very formative for them, very fragile, and very powerful at the same time. I always got inspired when I was in the company of Apolonia, and I really tried to give that inspiration to the audience to encourage creation.
