'Apolonia, Apolonia' is an astonishing art world documentary
Lea Glob’s film is the best nonfiction look at the art world since 'Exit Through the Gift Shop.' Plus: 'Big Fight in Little Chinatown' comes to Philadelphia
Apolonia, Apolonia is the last documentary that I saw in 2023, but it ended up as one of the best. Danish director Lea Glob’s film, filmed over 12 years, is a beautiful and contemplative look at the modern art world, in both Europe and the United States.
Glob certainly picked a compelling, one-of-a-kind subject, in French artist Apolonia Sokol. The film starts literally at the beginning — her parents filmed her birth, and that’s included here. But when we first meet her as an adult, Sokol is living a Bohemian existence in Paris, living in theater with a revolving cast of fellow hippies. This includes the Ukrainian feminist activist Oksana Shachko, with whom Sokol was especially close.
As the years go on, Sokol becomes a more successful and prominent figure, eventually arriving in the United States and falling under the sway of the controversial art world svengali Stefan Simchowitz. She rebels, including by deciding on a whim to get naked in front of an inflatable sculpture of a butt plug, that had been mounted as part of an art fair.
Apolonia, Apolonia isn’t nearly as formally wild as Banksy’s Exit Through the Gift Shop, which was the last time a big art world documentary reached this level. This film does, however, feature the director at one point turning the camera on herself, as Glob does after facing a health crisis.
The film was included in the DOC NYC festival back in November, but I admit it wasn’t quite on my radar until it got included on the Oscar shortlist last month. It opened last week in a handful of theaters and is scheduled to land on the streaming service Documentary+. Plus, I remember the screener having an HBO Max logo, perhaps it will land on that service at some point too.
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Philadelphia is currently consumed with a huge fight over whether or not a new arena for the 76ers will be built on East Market Street. This would displace most of the current Fashion District Mall — the home of Center City’s only movie multiplex — but the bigger controversy is that the project is strongly opposed by the adjacent Chinatown community.
The 76 Place project is not proposed as “in” Chinatown but rather next to it, but it is likely to disrupt life in the Chinatown neighborhood, both during the multi-year construction process and once the arena is built and hosting hundreds of events a year.
A documentary, Big Fight in Little Chinatown, surfaced on the festival circuit a couple of years ago, and it tells the story of gentrification battles that have taken place in various cities, including New York, Toronto, and Montreal, that have threatened the integrity of those Chinatowns. While the movie was made before the start of the Philly controversy, I figured it would get a local showing at some point as the 76 Place battle rages.
Last Friday, a screening of the film took place in Philadelphia’s Chinatown, at the Chinese Christian Church & Center on Vine Street, with director Karen Cho in attendance.
The film, while a bit overlong and scattershot, and cross-cutting a bit too much among the different cities, tells some compelling family stories and left me quite a bit more sympathetic to the anti-arena cause than I was previously.
I was also somewhat amused by this Letterboxd user, who pretty clearly meant to review Big Trouble in Little China, and put his review in the wrong place:
