116 min | NR | January 12, 2024 | Grasshopper Film
A painter spends thirteen years letting one filmmaker watch her chase a life in art. The money arrives with strings, the friendships fray, and the camera keeps rolling. It is a portrait of ambition that counts every receipt.
Apolonia Sokol is a painter. She grows up in a Paris theater her parents run as a squat and a refuge. Lea Glob begins filming her as a student and does not stop for thirteen years. The film tracks Sokol from art school in Paris to a patron’s compound in Los Angeles and back. Underneath the chronicle of a career sits a harder question about what an artist trades to keep making the work. This is a film about ambition and the price of it.
Apolonia Sokol carries the film as a woman who refuses to soften herself for buyers or boyfriends. She paints nudes and friends and lovers with the same unhurried attention the camera gives her. Oksana Shachko enters as her closest friend, a Femen co-founder living in exile and burning through her own talent. Their bond is the emotional spine of the film and its deepest wound. Stefan Simchowitz appears as the collector who offers money and exposure on terms that curdle. He talks like a patron and bargains like a speculator.
Lea Glob directs and writes, and she folds her own life into the frame. Her narration arrives in the first person and admits her stake in the woman she films. The editing compresses years of handheld footage into a portrait that moves by accumulation rather than event. Glob lets the grain and aspect ratios shift as the formats of a decade pile up. A medical crisis in Glob’s own life interrupts the project and reshapes it. The film becomes a document of two women instead of one.
The film earns its intimacy by refusing to flatter anyone in it, including the woman behind the camera. Sokol’s talent is never in doubt. What stays in doubt is whether the art world will let her keep it on her own terms. Glob builds a thirteen-year vigil and resists the urge to resolve it into a triumph. The result is a portrait of an artist that takes the cost of the work as seriously as the work.