Dea Kulumbegashvili could be the most famous director who emerges in the last decade from Georgia, a nation of about 3.6 million people who were once part of the Soviet Union. His debut, “Beginning”, was the presentation of his country for the best international film Oscar in 2021 and his last “April”, which opens in the US theaters on Friday, won the Prize for the Special Jury at the 2024 Venice Film Festival.
Yet Kulumbegashvili, who lives in Berlin, is not particularly welcomed at home.
“April”, who follows an obstetrician who performs abortions illegally, has not been undergone screening in Georgia. “It has no distribution potential because nobody wants to face something that would cause a problem with the authorities,” said Kulumbegashvili in a video interview.
Although abortion is legal in Georgia for pregnancies under 12 weeks, reality for women, in particular those who live outside the main cities, is complicated. The vast majority of the Georgians are Orthodox Christians and traditional ideas on gender roles and on the domesticity I subput in most families.
The film was “essentially shot in secret,” said Kulumbegashvili. He did not look for domestic funding, based on his producers – who included Luca Guadagnino, Italian director of “Challengers” and “Call Me with your name” – to raise funds from international sources.
Kulumbegashvili grew up in Lagodekhi, a small town at the foot of the mountains of the Caucasus, near the border with Azerbaijan; Both “Beginn” and “April” were shot there. Seign marriage is a continuous question in the city, Kulumbegashvili said, as is in the rest of the country.
The director, now 39 years old, recalled that his best childhood friend got married when he was 15 years old. “I recently saw a video recording of his wedding,” he said, “and even if everyone was having fun, it was clearly a tragic thing”.
The minimum legal age for the marriage in Georgia is 18 years old, but Kulumbegashvili has said that the authorities have often closed an eye on the minor marriage, even if they involved reports for the bride. About 14 percent of Georgian girls is married before turning 18, according to the United Nations Fund for the population and many weddings are not officially registered.
When Kulumbegashvili was in Lagodekhi who resumed “the beginning”, who focuses on the abused wife of a leader of Jehovah's witnesses, he met children from schools from all over the surrounding region as part of a large process of street cast. The children had to be accompanied by a guardian, who allowed Kulumbegashvili to meet dozens of young mothers, who shared their experiences of breeding of families in poverty while they came under pressure to bear multiple children.
Those conversations stimulated the concept of “April”, whose production has also been modeled by larger currents in Georgian politics.
Since he took power in 2013, the Georgian dream party that governs the country has advanced an increasingly conservative anti-western agenda. Access to abortion, for example, is now suffocated by additional costs and bureaucratic obstacles such as a mandatory waiting period of five days after an initial radiology exam and multiple compulsory consultations with social and doctors.
After the parliamentary elections of last October, several new laws entered into force, including serious restrictions on foreign funding for the media and non -governmental organizations, many of which provide educational resources and health services for the Georgians of the working class.
“Basically, human rights are reduced,” said Kulumbegashvili.
The protagonist of “April”, a dark doctor but with named Nina, played by Ia Sukhitashvili, steps in which the Georgia's social and state doctors have failed. He works in a maternity and moonlight clinic as an abortionist, paying clandestine visits to rural women who cannot afford a trip to Tbilisi, the capital. Many of his patients fear the violent backlash from their fathers or husbands if their pregnancies outside the pass-o Passo-o unauthorized abortions-they had to be known.
Sukhitashvili declared away and -mail that it was disappointed by the fact that “April” would not have been shown in Georgia. “I know that if he had the opportunity to show the film, he would have made people think about the problems he raises,” he said.
The film, which is composed of strangely static tables intended to emphasize Nina's solitude, is not didactic. It does not break the gloomy socio -cultural context, but pushes the viewer in his folds.
At the beginning, the camera is perched on an operating table while a woman pushes out a child born dead. The scene seems incredibly direct for a reason: the patient and doctors are not actors and we are witnessing a real birth.
Several employees of the clinic where Kulumbegashvili has filmed her since she was a child, a connection that helped cultivate trust. Sukhitashvili and Kulumbegashvili studied the clinic operations for more than a year and developed a relationship with patients, one of whom, said Kulumbegashvili, had the idea of filming births.
In the middle of the film, a scene of tense and minimum abortion takes place realistically in a long recovery, but it is only a performance. Like the birth scenes, however, demonstrates the vulnerability and strength of the bodies in pregnancy in extremis.
The rest of “April” undertakes to view Nina's spiritual turbulence in front of “gross patriarchal powers”, said Guadagnino, who helped raise funds for the film.
Guadagnino was president of the jury at the San Sebastián International Film Festival the year in which “Beginning” won four prizes, including the best film, director and actress (for Sukhitashvili, in her first role with Kulumbegashvili). After signing to produce “April”, Guadagnino also enrolled the normal kulumbegashvili filmmaker, Arseni Khachaaturan, to shoot his love story of vampires “Bones and All”.
In 2024 in the native Italy of Guadagnino, the government approved a law that allows 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 who have denied the right to choose, in “ferocious and metaphysical” ways.
In Georgia, Kulumbegashvili said, which often means a sense of helplessness. “People don't care about seeking help because they know that resources are limited and the authorities do nothing,” he said.
“Perhaps the films do not count in the great 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 making breaks from their normal life,” said Kulumbegashvili. “Maybe they had never imagined how their lives could be different until then.”