The two sequences that form the beginning of Dea Kulumbegashvili’s April set a mood of violent unease. We follow a faceless creature, vaguely humanoid despite its extensive scarring, wading through deep puddles of rainwater, when suddenly the scene shifts to a maternity ward. There, the camera captures an unsimulated live birth, one that obstetrician Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili) quickly realizes is a stillbirth. The sense of dissonance is immediate and immense, and the tensions between formalism and a documentary-like immersion never quite give way over the next two hours.
Though this film, which premiered at Venice last year and won the Special Jury Prize, is only Kulumbegashvili’s second feature, it is remarkably assured in its approach to both style and theme. Just as her 2020 debut Beginning used the firebombing of a Jehovah’s Witness community’s place of worship as an opening to interrogate the spiritual disillusionment of a rural Georgian village, April starts out as an examination of abortion rights, while gradually expanding in scope. Following Nina as she oscillates between her job at the hospital and performing illicit abortions in the homes of villagers, Kulumbegashvili uncovers many more facets of life in the countryside, the very same community she grew up in. On the occasion of April’s U.S. theatrical release, I sat down with Kulumbegashvili to discuss the project.
Tony Yang: Hi, Dea. It’s very nice to be speaking to you today. First of all, I wanted to say congrats on the film. It’s a very moving film, and one that I think very much deserves to be seen on the big screen. The first thing that I wanted to ask about is the title of the film itself, April. A point of comparison that I’ve seen quite a bit of is with the line in T.S. Eliot’s poem: “April is the cruelest month.” There’s a tension in the film, between the sublime beauty of the nature surrounding the villages and the sort of casual violence that is simply occurring and has become part of the lives of the people living there. I was wondering if you could elaborate on that tension a bit, and if that was something you had in mind while coming up with the title.
Dea Kulumbegashvili: Thank you. I guess the question has to do with what cruelty really means, right? April, especially in rural places, is the beginning of something new, which inevitably often means the end of something at the same time. And this process, like springtime, isn’t always a smooth process, right? It’s a painful process and a cruel process at the same time. And I guess I wouldn’t want to interpret too much, because I don’t usually like to talk about the meaning of things too much. But obviously I was thinking about the poem, and it was going through my head many times while I was working on the film. And I just wanted to give the film the name of this one word, which I hope will evoke the meanings within the viewer’s imagination and what it could mean to each separate viewer, regardless of what meaning I would put in this title.
TY: Right. And I think it’s really interesting that you bring up the idea of spring and rejuvenation, because it really did feel like there were a lot of scenes that were full of life; not just the scenery, from flowers to a rainstorm, but also the animals, which stood out to me as I was watching the film. There’s a scene with a pack of dogs quite early on, and very memorably a scene at dawn which takes place at a market where different cattle are being sold. Was that something that you always decided to include? Or were those moments just something you picked up along the shoot?
DK: No, it was very much written in the script. First of all, those dogs are part of the life in that town because they are stray dogs, real stray dogs from the streets, which we trained for months to participate in the film.
Then that cattle market is somewhere which I used to go as a child with my grandfather. And I remember all these animals being brought there to be sold, and it was sort of a very violent place and a very violent memory from my childhood for me. But when I went there again while preparing for the film, and I started to talk to the people who brought the animals to sell, I started to understand that for most of the people there this was their only means to survive and to feed their families with the money they would make from selling these animals. So again, it was some sort of circle of violence we are all a part of, animals and people at the same time. And it was important for me to also grasp the faces of all these men, and to capture the faces of all these men who are in this market, and to really somehow allude to the question of what the lives of these men are like. Because for me, animal and man are in this market together, they’re part of some sort of shared universe. But yes, it was always planned and written this way.
TY: And when it comes to that connection between different elements of the village, the human and natural components of it, I then think about the creature or the phantom in the film, who is almost a manifestation of that in betweenness of life and lack thereof. And I was wondering, did you plan out the role that the creature played in the film to serve as a parallel of sorts with what the protagonist Nina experiences? Or do you think it plays another role altogether?
DK: Well, when I was working on the film, on some days, it was sometimes unbearable, the things we would see and how painful it was for me emotionally to encounter certain things. And then I started to feel and think about the fact that the character of Nina — as she’s been in this town for so long, for years, going from one village to another, doing abortions and helping women — how much pain, how much tragedy she would have seen, and what did it do to her as a person? When did that experience become unbearable or overwhelming for her, and how would she react? And somehow for me, it started to become this desperate need to get out from this experience, but not to physically leave, because I don’t think it’s possible for Nina to leave physically, because she’s very much committed to her duty as a doctor.
But this need to leave is very much a human experience. And then it started to become this creature, which is stuck in between, which is not something human, but it’s not something else yet at the same time. It’s between something and something else, basically. And I didn’t want to create some sort of explanation in the film that Nina turns into it or how she is turning into it, but rather, and you’re correct, I wanted to grasp this process of transformation or betweenness somehow. And the rest I would really want to leave it to the audience and to the viewer, but I hope that somehow this creature, and the sense of non-reality, makes the rest of the film feel even more real.
TY: Something that really stood out to me visually was how you stage scenes with multiple characters in dialogue with each other. You pack the frame with multiple layers, and the positioning of these characters in a given frame reveals certain things about the power dynamic that perhaps they have in relation to each other, while also making the indoor spaces they’re inhabiting suddenly feel a lot larger and more multidimensional. So I was wondering if you could speak to the staging of these sequences.
DK: Maybe I’m a very lazy director somehow, because Beginning was shot with one lens, and this film is also mostly shot with one lens, other than the abortion scenes. And I guess when you really limit your technical means by narrowing it down to just one lens, things start to suddenly make sense in a different way. Because for me, it’s really important to focus on what’s happening in front of the camera. I really love working with actors, and when I have just one lens, it really helps me to focus more on the power dynamic of what’s in front of the camera.
But then it’s really a pain to understand where the camera should be. Sometimes it’s so close to the actors that they start to feel very uncomfortable, but then again it starts to become important for the scene for the actor to feel a bit of discomfort because of the closeness of the camera physically towards them. And because I’ve been very lucky to work with this ensemble of actors who are very good friends, and because we had so many rehearsals, they really trusted me and allowed me to get really close to them with the camera. And they even started to enjoy all the attention, in a really strange way, because I was always next to the camera and looking with my eyes at the actors. Because I don’t trust the monitors, I feel that whatever I see with my own eyes is what’s really happening in front of the camera.
And I don’t usually want to create specific meanings or symbolism of some sort from the staging of a scene, but of course it’s very important to consider how much space we give a character on the screen, or how much space we deny them. For example, one of the first scenes in the film is a dialogue scene between several people in the room of a head doctor, and we see Nina mostly either from her back or her profile, but then the rest of the film, we often end up following only her perspective. And that hospital space was actually built by us, as an exact copy of the real hospital in the village, because it’s very important for me to have complete freedom when working in the interiors, because interiors are something very intimate but at the same time very limiting, and I want this limit to also be felt in the scene. And I like the sterility of the hospital, and having very few characters, which allows us to really focus on acting and on the actors that are present, while we remove everything else, leaving no space for distractions.
TY: While the film is very much drawing from your own experiences and from the experiences that women in your community and home country face when it comes to accessing abortion, and the moral and legal gray areas involved, I do feel like there is also a universality to it, especially since there are a lot of other countries that are also facing these sorts of gray areas, including the U.S. in its current state. So I was wondering whether your perceptions toward the film’s subject may have changed after seeing the responses that it’s had internationally?
DK: Well, not really. On the one hand, during the filmmaking process, it’s always important for me to focus on the actual place of where I’m making a film and understanding how people live there. But on the other hand, I think that it’s a universal experience regardless, because this film is not only about abortion, it’s about being a woman and the female experience in this world. And sadly, I don’t think that it’s that different between so-called more developed countries and places which are maybe not that advanced in certain cases. Like here in the United States, while we were making the film, a lot of things were happening here that were a step back in terms of women’s rights, and I guess that it’s something which is happening across the globe now.
I think that in general, when we talk about times of some sort of extreme changes, what really starts to suffer first is usually women’s rights. I don’t know why people are so unable to accept that women can have full control over their own bodies. It’s a big subject for me. I think that Christianity may have made things a bit worse, or rather, different religions associated with Christianity made things a bit worse starting from the Middle Ages, in terms of how women were perceived. And not much has changed weirdly. Sometimes when I look at things in my home country, for example, in Georgia, I can see that honestly women are not seen as separate individuals who have the same rights as men, not only regarding our bodies, but just having the same rights in general. And this might sound horrible, and I hope I am wrong, but I think that if people were given the opportunity, they would revert things to how it was before we even gained our right to vote, because there is some kind of fear towards women in our cultures.
TY: Right, I think that tension between the past and the present, and even just that danger of progress suddenly reversing, is definitely felt in the film as well. So I once again wanted to say congratulations on the film, and thank you very much for speaking to me about it.
DK: Thank you very much, it was a pleasure.
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