Dea Kulumbegashvili may be the most celebrated filmmaker to emerge in the past decade from Georgia, a nation of about 3.6 million people that was once part of the Soviet Union. Her debut, “Beginning” (2020), was her country’s submission for the best international feature Oscar in 2021, and her latest, “April,” which opens in U.S. theaters on Friday, won the special jury prize at the 2024 Venice Film Festival.
Yet Kulumbegashvili, who lives in Berlin, doesn’t feel particularly welcome back home.
“April,” which follows an obstetrician who performs abortions illegally, has not been screened in Georgia. “It has no distribution potential because no one wants to deal with something that would cause a problem with the authorities,” Kulumbegashvili said in a video interview.
Though abortion is legal in Georgia for pregnancies under 12 weeks, the reality for women — especially those living outside the major cities — is complicated. A vast majority of Georgians are Orthodox Christians, and traditional ideas about gender roles and domesticity hold sway in most families.
The film was “essentially shot in secret,” Kulumbegashvili said. She did not seek domestic funding, instead relying on her producers — who included Luca Guadagnino, the Italian director of “Challengers” and “Call Me by Your Name” — to raise money from international sources.
Kulumbegashvili’s grew up in Lagodekhi, a small town at the foot of the Caucasus Mountains, near the border with Azerbaijan; both “Beginning” and “April” were shot there. Underage marriage is a continuing issue in the town, Kulumbegashvili said — as it is in the rest of the country.
The director, now 39, remembered her childhood best friend getting married when she was 15. “I recently rewatched a video recording of her wedding,” she said, “and even though everyone was having a great time, it was clearly a tragic thing.”
The minimum legal age for marriage in Georgia is 18, but Kulumbegashvili said that the authorities often turned a blind eye to underage marriage, even if they involved bride abductions. About 14 percent of Georgian girls are married before they turn 18, according to the United Nations Population Fund, and many marriages aren’t officially registered.
When Kulumbegashvili was in Lagodekhi filming “Beginning,” which centers on the abused wife of a Jehovah’s Witness leader, she met children from schools all over the surrounding region as part of an expansive street-casting process. The children had to be accompanied by a guardian, which allowed Kulumbegashvili to meet dozens of young mothers, who shared their experiences of raising families in poverty while being pressured to bear more children.
Those conversations spurred the concept for “April,” whose production was also shaped by broader currents in Georgian politics.
Since taking power in 2013, the country’s governing Georgian Dream party has advanced an increasingly conservative, anti-Western agenda. Access to abortion, for instance, is now stifled by additional costs and bureaucratic obstacles such as a mandatory five-day waiting period after an initial radiology exam and multiple mandatory consultations with social workers and doctors.
After parliamentary elections last October, several new laws have gone into effect, including severe restrictions on foreign funding for media and nongovernmental organizations — many of which provide educational resources and health services for working-class Georgians.
“Basically, human rights are being diminished,” Kulumbegashvili said.
The protagonist of “April,” a gloomy yet gifted doctor named Nina, played by Ia Sukhitashvili, steps in where Georgia’s state-run social and medical programs have failed. She works at a maternity clinic and moonlights as an abortionist, paying clandestine visits to rural women who can’t afford a trip to Tbilisi, the capital. Many of her patients fear violent backlash from their fathers or husbands if their out-of-wedlock pregnancies — or unsanctioned abortions — were to become known.
Sukhitashvili said by email that she was disappointed that “April” wouldn’t be shown in Georgia. “I know that if we were given the chance to show the film, it would have made people reflect on the issues it raises,” she said.
The film, which is composed of eerily static tableaus meant to emphasize Nina’s solitude, isn’t didactic. It doesn’t break down the grim sociocultural context, but it does thrust the viewer into its folds.
Early on, the camera is perched above an operating table as a woman pushes out a stillborn baby. The scene feels shockingly direct for a reason: The patient and doctors aren’t actors, and we are witnessing a real childbirth.
Several employees of the clinic where Kulumbegashvili filmed have known her since she was a child, a connection that helped cultivate trust. Sukhitashvili and Kulumbegashvili studied the clinic’s operations for more than a year and developed a rapport with patients, one of whom, Kulumbegashvili said, came up with the idea to film the births.
Midway through the film, a tense and minimal abortion scene unfolds realistically in one long take, but it’s just a performance. Like the birthing scenes, however, it demonstrates the vulnerability and strength of pregnant bodies in extremis.
The rest of “April” is committed to visualizing Nina’s spiritual turmoil in the face of “gross patriarchal powers,” said Guadagnino, who helped raise funds for the film.
Guadagnino was the jury president at the San Sebastián International Film Festival the year that “Beginning” won four awards, including best film, director and actress (for Sukhitashvili, in her first role with Kulumbegashvili). After signing on to produce “April,” Guadagnino also enlisted Kulumbegashvili’s regular cinematographer, Arseni Khachaturan, to shoot his vampire romance “Bones and All.”
In 2024 in Guadagnino’s native Italy, the government passed a law allowing anti-abortion groups to play a role in family planning clinics, and in the United States, the reversal of Roe v. Wade has allowed some states to implement restrictions on abortion. Guadagnino said that “April” presents the suffering of those denied the right to choose, in “fierce, metaphysical ways.”
In Georgia, Kulumbegashvili said, that often means a sense of helplessness. “People don’t bother looking for help because they know that resources are limited and the authorities won’t do anything,” she said.
“Maybe films don’t matter in the grand scheme of things, but I like to think that the women and children who visited my set, who were so open and enthusiastic about being involved, were taking breaks from their regular lives,” Kulumbegashvili said. “Maybe they had never imagined how their lives could be different until then.”
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