06/09/2024 - VENICE 2024: After a long winter, spring always comes in the end, but in the Georgian director’s film, this particular April is cold and dark

(© Giorgio Zucchiatti/La Biennale di Venezia/Foto ASAC)

Georgia’s Dea Kulumbegashvili follows up her award-winning Beginning [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Dea Kulumbegashvili
film profile] with April [+see also:
film review
interview: Dea Kulumbegashvili
film profile], shown in Venice’s main competition. Her protagonist, Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili), is being accused of neglect: a newborn has just died on her watch, and the volatile father wants to know why. He also wants to know why Nina was delivering his child in the first place. After all, everyone in the village knows she has been performing secret abortions.

(The article continues below - Commercial information)

Cineuropa: After your previous film, Beginning, you still seem to be interested in suffering.
Dea Kulumbegashvili: What else should I be making films about? Someone else already made Joker.

Ironically enough, Joker is also about suffering.
Maybe because it’s so universal. Suffering is living, in a way. I don’t know if I would say that pain is one of my particular interests, but when you really examine a character in a story, everybody suffers. You quickly realise that.

She resigns herself to her pain. Nina believes in something so much she continues to do it, even though there’s no glory in it. Someone openly tells her: “No one will ever thank you.” Why do you think some people do it?
If you really serve your profession and your cause, it can only be done this way. Any kind of external gratification, also material, would prove to be futile. She is just so committed to what she does. I was wondering: “Is she really a hero?” But what is a hero? That was such an interesting question for me to ask. When we are little, or in school, everyone tells you about this “hero’s journey”, but what about normal, daily life? I guess I prefer quiet heroism. Her friend, on the other hand, is just trying to cover up his own cowardice. We often tend to do that, as humans. At least he can admit that he has failed. That’s important.

April is quite realistic – until you introduce a creature that doesn’t seem to belong to the same universe. Without knowing why, I felt connected to her, even though she remains faceless.
She doesn’t have a face or facial expressions. At first, we wanted to create her together with the main actress, but it was impossible – actors are so used to expressing themselves that she was suffering! This creature is emotional, however, and I get emotional when I look at her – precisely because she’s stuck in that body and unable to talk. It makes me feel so much empathy towards her.

At first, in development, the creature kept provoking quite a discussion – every producer had a completely different take on who she really was. I understood it was a problem – it wasn’t specific enough, so we continued working on it. I do trust my intuition, especially when I do something that’s not exactly straightforward. You have to trust what you feel when you are filming.

It’s easy to feel protective of her – and of that protagonist. Because of Nina’s risky choices, it feels like watching a horror film, when you suspect from the very start that something bad is surely going to happen.
I also pity her, and I don’t know if that’s a good thing. But I wanted the audience to also experience that, to pity her for this overwhelming empathy. I have to say I don’t believe in film genres. You just have to tell your story, instead of following their rules and getting stuck respecting them too faithfully. There’s something unsettling about Nina’s nocturnal encounters with strangers, but what about something like Tinder? It’s so scary! I can’t understand why anyone uses it.