April [2024]

 Déa Kulumbegashvili’s second feature April, like her shattering debut film Beginning, was an austere, minimalist, brooding, intensely intimate and formally rigorous work. Operating in the intersection of sparse and desolate realism, scorching social commentaries and undercurrents, and elemental body horror, the film was foremost – like its predecessor – a radical exercise in feminism and a searing investigation into small-town bigotry. Women’s mind, body and agency were evoked as political and personal battlegrounds through its protagonist Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili), an ob-gyn who complements her work in conventional hospitals delivering children with performing secret abortions and surreptitiously providing birth control procedures in intensely religious, conservative and patriarchal village communities. Her acutely isolated life – she fills up her spare time by either being lost in her ravaged interiority or dangerously picking up strange men while taking lonely long drives or engaging in emotionally vacant on-off physical encounters with a kindly ex-boyfriend (Kakha Kintsurashvili) who’s also a respected colleague at the hospital where she works – is punctuated when a baby dies upon a natural delivery performed by her. The grief-stricken father, associating the tragic occurrence with her rumoured work as an abortionist, accuses her of wilful murder, leading to growing scrutiny on the hospital and in turn on Nina’s professional ethics and morality. Sukhitashvili gave a spellbinding turn in portraying her solitary, troubled and defiant character’s emotional struggles and existential crises. The film comprised of a string of viscerally unsettling sequences – including a “live” birth like Márta Mészáros’ Nine Months and a clandestine abortion like Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3, Weeks and 2 Days – shot with gripping exactitude in bravura long takes, while its “slow cinema” aesthetics were accompanied by disquieting imagery and nightmarish atmosphere.

p.s. Watched it at the 2025 Bangalore International Film Festival (BIFFES).

Director: Dea Kulumbegashvili

Genre: Drama/Psychological Drama/Social Drama/Experimental Film

Language: Georgian

Country: Georgia