05/09/2024 - VENICE 2024: Georgian writer-director Dea Kulumbegashvili’s long-awaited sophomore feature is a mesmerising Golden Lion contender, thanks to its assured vision, singularity and depth

At the beginning of April [+see also:
interview: Dea Kulumbegashvili
film profile], filmmaker Dea Kulumbegashvili’s entry in this year’s main competition at Venice, you will see at least two things you won’t be able to forget easily. One is a naked, fleshy, female-bodied figure walking through a marsh, enveloped in near-darkness. The other is a natural birth, shot from above in a long take under the merciless, luminescent light of a surgery room. There might be a relation between these two scenes, but maybe not. In the rich cinematic worlds conjured up by the Georgian writer-director, the semantic gaps and the detours matter more than any straight line.

You might remember Kulumbegashvili’s 2020 debut, Beginning [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Dea Kulumbegashvili
film profile], which took San Sebastián by storm, winning the Awards for Best Film, Director, Screenplay and Actress, before enjoying a long and celebrated festival run. Its aesthetics, pacing and formal rigour put the filmmaker on the map, and her sophomore feature was one of the most highly anticipated on the Lido: no wonder, as it is a strong Golden Lion contender thanks to its assured vision, singularity and depth.

In a loose plot structure, we follow Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili), who is an experienced and respected ob-gyn in a hospital in eastern Georgia. The hospital is reliable but rather stringent in the way it serves certain interests; often, family members pressure Nina to make sure the young, married girls get pregnant soon. There, fertility is the marker of a successful woman (and, by extension, of a whole family), and the rumours that Nina performs illegal, clandestine abortions don’t do her any favours.

After the death of a newborn, Nina is accused of negligence and tensions mount. Despite the support of her colleague and ex David (Kakha Kintsurashvili), as well as the tempered backing of the head doctor (Merab Ninidze), she feels that things are coming undone. There are many striking sequences that punctuate this investigative narrative line, most of them mystical, others symbolic, but they contribute to the film world in a much more palpable way than any simple recounting of the plot. For the visuals, Kulumbegashvili teams up with her Beginning cinematographer, Arseni Khachaturan (who, in the meantime, has lensed Bones and All [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile] by one of the film’s producers, Luca Guadagnino, as well as episodes of the controversial TV show The Idol), whose deep staging, phantom rides, point-of-view shots, and almost imperceptible sways and immobile, long takes make April a cosmos of its own.

In one instance, the camera observes a poppy field, and in another, there is a long, electrifying sequence of a thunderstorm unfolding. While in other films, these shots of nature would evoke classical aesthetic notions such as “the sublime” in their most abstract, April is grounded in the image and the sounds of nature, their textures, and even their smell. The storm leaves behind a lot of mud, and the camera captures the place’s earthiness as a tactile remnant of a world beyond fiction. On the one hand, we have spring, soil, fertility and the month of April, and on the other, women’s bodies, young and not-so-young, their pregnancies and abortions, their sex, and their restlessness. These themes flow through April, but never drive it, at least not in the strict narrative sense, because this is a film we are supposed to live and breathe with. Guided by either troubled or deep breaths coming from off screen, or from the occasionally unidentifiable first-person perspective of the camera, we participate in this film-ritual, willingly.

April was produced by Paris-based firm First Picture, Italy’s Frenesy Film and Memo Films, ARTE France Cinéma and Independent Film Project (Georgia). Goodfellas handles its world sales.