In this extraordinary second feature from Georgian director Dea Kulumbegashvili, a female gynecologist takes on a side job as an illegal abortion doctor, with dire consequences.
BEGIN – Official HD Trailer – A Film by Dea Kulumbegashvili
Abortion is officially legal in Georgia, but it might as well not be. A woman can request an abortion up to 12 weeks into her pregnancy, but given the fierce public and political opposition to the practice, she’s unlikely to find a clinic that will agree to perform it. It’s a phantom right, a yes-but-no deception, just one of the many ways women’s lives are hemmed in and hemmed in by a world that promises more freedom than it gives. Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili), a senior gynecologist in a poor area of eastern Georgia, has grown stoically accustomed to this oppression, using her skills and relative social privilege to work around it where she can. But years of resentment against the system have taken a heavy toll on her inner life — and even, in the most nightmarish interludes of Dea Kulumbegashvili’s stunning second feature, April, her sense of self.
An uncompromising, intensely felt panorama of female identities, agencies, and desires under attack—by patriarchy, certainly, but also sometimes by the elusive cruelties of nature itself—April manages to be both a work of controlled formal rigor and unleashed, often overwhelming human feeling. As such, it lives up to the colossal promise of Kulumbegashvili’s 2020 debut, Beginning , another startling study of womanhood persecuted and violated in the rural heartland of Georgia, while pushing her filmmaking to greater extremes of surrealism and unflappable observation of the real world. Perhaps the most declarative and challenging statement of directorial intent in this year’s Venice competition, the film should cement its 38-year-old director on the festival’s A-list of auteurs, though it remains a tricky proposition for distributors.
As president of the jury at the San Sebastian Festival the year “Beginning” won, Italian filmmaker Luca Guadagnino was so impressed with Kulumbegashvili’s first film that he offered his services as producer on her second. Anyone wondering whether the collaboration might signal a crossover into more mainstream arthouse territory is quickly set right in the film’s alternately oblique and explicit introductory minutes. The film opens with the image of a creature, humanoid yet otherworldly, hunched in the dark against a shifting sonic backdrop of playing children, falling rainfall and, eventually, the heavy, slimy breathing of the unrecognizable creature itself. Its skin is stretched and bunched where you least expect it, its face an unreadable flesh mask, its stance at once unnerving and vulnerable.
