Dea Kulumbegashvili was researching April, her extraordinary new film, when she encountered familiar faces in horrific circumstances. The director recognised a dying woman who was rushed into the emergency department of the hospital where she was preparing to make the feature.
The woman’s husband insisted her condition was the result of a gas leak. But the truth was soon revealed: he had murdered her. Kulumbegashvili knew the woman. She knew the killer. And she knew the police chief who eventually arrested (and assaulted) the perpetrator. That senior officer, a former classmate of the film-maker, was subsequently removed from his post.
“When they brought in the woman she was still alive,” Kulumbegashvili, who is Georgian, and grew up in the town of Lagodekhi, at the foot of the Caucasus Mountains, says, “but they already knew that they would not be able to save her. I didn’t even know how to talk about it. I still don’t. They had three small children. It was difficult to imagine that a family was waiting at home.
“Everybody wanted to take a break. Everybody was so sad. But then it was so strange. I went to talk to my sister. And she said that’s what life is like here. I was shocked she would think that about something so horrible. I left Georgia to study. I was away for 10 years, and my sister stayed behind in this town. Horrible could be a daily experience.”
Those horrible daily experiences lie at the heart of April, winner of the special jury prize at last year’s Venice International Film Festival.
Abortion is legal in Georgia but heavily restricted; terminations are typically prohibited after six weeks, when foetal cardiac activity is detectable. Against this backdrop, Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili), the chilly heroine of April, is in constant peril.
An obstetrician who moonlights as an abortionist in rural eastern Georgia, she has as a patient a mute, intellectually disabled teenager who has evidently become pregnant by a family member.
When a delivery Nina has overseen results in the baby’s death, its furious father accuses her of malpractice. Kulumbegashvili’s enigmatic script keeps the viewer guessing. Is the family suspicious because they know about Nina’s covert work in the villages? Or has the defiantly anti-natalist doctor decided that the family would be better off without another dependant?
She is unapologetic when quizzed by her colleague and ex-lover (Kakha Kintsurashvili) after he is tasked with investigating the incident.
“It’s important to mention that the film is not only about a person; it’s about female experiences and violence,” the director says. “Illegal abortion is not only a problem in Georgia. It’s a problem in some advanced democracies, like the United States.
“Nina is a doctor. She wants to change things. I wanted to make a film about somebody who is connected to her choice in life. She chose this profession for a reason. She’s not judging. She’s not emotionally engaged with the people she looks after. She just does her job.
“It’s only at the end she understands that maybe this was not enough. It was important for me to ask this question: is being faithful to your professional responsibilities enough?”
Kulumbegashvili spent a year in a rural Georgian clinic with her cinematographer Arseni Khachaturan, shadowing doctors and interviewing pregnant women. She and Sukhitashvili spent additional months embedded in a maternity ward. The director also, graphically, shows a real birth and epidural in her film.
“The inspiration came from meeting women for my first feature, Beginning,” she says. “I thought it would be fun to follow the story of a doctor. And then I started to research the subject. I started to meet the doctors who were doing very heroic things.”
There’s a lot is happening for women in Georgia. They were isolated and not allowed to do things for so long. Finally, we can tell the stories which have never been told before through the female point of view
— Dea Kulumbegashvili
Despite overlapping themes, this is a very different study of abortion from Audrey Diwan’s Happening or Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days. The verisimilitude of April is counterweighted by immersive pastoral sequences and strange, dreamlike interludes featuring a muddy, saggy female form trudging in watery darkness. The mysterious form is accompanied by heavy breathing and the cheery sound of children playing.
Some critics have interpreted the “monster” as a manifestation of Nina’s fear of childbirth. Others see a medieval witch or monster who kills babies. For the director, the shape has a different meaning.
“When I started to research the film I went to the villages, from one family to another, and I was talking to women,” Kulumbegashvili says.
“They are my age. They might have seven or eight children by now. And I started to feel that Nina, this character who had been practising abortions in the villages for many years, would have a sense of something chasing her. And how it could become at times impossible to take – that she would almost want to escape human experience altogether.
“And then this figure started to appear to me, something that was the process of transformation or departure from the life Nina knew. And the figure, like Nina, is also stuck in a world she can’t escape from.”
Kulumbegashvili, who is 39, was born in Russia to a teenage mother. Her family relocated to rural Georgia when she was a baby. Her grandmother, a teacher, taught locals how to read and write.
“I’m Ossetian,” she says, referring to the region of Ossetia, which straddles the Caucasus Mountains. “There is still a lot of Russian language and literature in our family. I initially went to a Russian-language school, but I switched to a Georgian one because it was the 1990s and there was a civil war – and that made me Satan, right?
“With my nationality it was already a problem. But during the war it was very difficult to be a ‘Satan girl’ in a small Georgian town. Even when I went to university it was difficult, because I was singled out as somebody who represented a very problematic group of people.
“I am very grateful for this complex cultural background that my family has. It’s not only Ossetian. It’s also Georgian, Jewish and Russian. And then I went to the US, then Berlin. And that was much-needed distance from my country. Georgia is a small country with too much happening. Being away helped me to put some things into perspective.”
She studied film directing at Columbia University School of the Arts and media studies at the New School, both in New York. Her debut, Invisible Spaces, was nominated for a Palme d’Or for short film at Cannes in 2014. Two years later her second short, Lethe, was selected for the festival’s Directors’ Fortnight.
Beginning, her debut feature, which includes such indelible images as the firebombing of a Jehovah’s Witness prayer house, rape, and a magical disappearance, proved a critical sensation in 2020.
The film won numerous international awards, placed in the British Film Institute’s 50 films of the year and was Georgia’s selection for the Academy Awards. It found a fan in Luca Guadagnino, director of Challengers and Call Me by Your Name, who serves as a producer of April.
Following the new film’s triumph at Venice, the Oscar winner Emma Stone has signed on for Kulumbegashvili’s secret English-language debut. Few international directors have quite so many expectant eyes on them.
“I think that attention is important,” she says. “It’s important because it means Georgian cinema has a presence. I wanted the entire team to know that their work was appreciated.
“It’s not possible to screen April in Georgia. So at the same time when we were watching the film in Venice, we held a private screening in Georgia for everybody who was part of the film. The Georgian film-makers I work with make impossible things happen with very little money and in difficult conditions.”
Momentum has been building for female Georgian film-makers. Nana Ekvtimishvili scored international attention with her depiction of child brides in the 2013 drama In Bloom; she also won a Netflix deal and acclaim at Berlin and Sundance with the 2017 film My Happy Family. More recently, Elene Naveriani’s Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry has hoovered up awards and raves at Cannes and beyond.
“There’s a lot is happening for women in Georgia,” Kulumbegashvili says. “They were isolated and not allowed to do things for so long. Finally, we can tell the stories which have never been told before through the female point of view.
“I’ve never met Nana Ekvtimishvili, even though we live in such a small country. I don’t come to the capital that much in general. I stay a lot where I make films, in east Georgia. All of us are talking about so many different experiences.”
She sounds divided about the future.
“In Georgia we had a female president while there was also an incredibly high level of femicide,” Kulumbegashvili says. “I don’t know what obstacles she faced. Maybe she couldn’t make a difference. But cinema is a place where we can talk about all these things.”
April is in cinemas from Friday, April 25th
