Dir/Wri: Dea Kulumbegashvili | Ia Sukhitashvili, Kakha Kintsurashvili, Merab Ninidze | DoP: Arseni Khachaturan | Georgia, Drama 134′
Birth, life and death in the Caucasian Mountains is the focus of this extraordinary existential film. April is a Tarkovskian slow-burn thriller, part love story, part murder mystery, competing for the Golden Lion at Venice 2024 and certainly deserving of its award of Special Jury Prize. This penetrating portrait of guilt, alienation and quiet trauma is a second film for Georgia’s Dea Kulumbegashvili who swept the board with her 2020 debut Beginning, and now has Luca Guadagnino as a producer. It explores the state of existing as a woman without fulfilling traditional expectations.
High in a mountain village a mummified, atavistic figure plods along in pitch black while voices of children sing outing the void. Rain falls on a muddy puddle: April showers. A woman gives birth in a traumatic scene. The baby dies. There’s a great deal of darkness in April. All this contrasts with bursts of blinding light: the zinging colours of Spring, a rebirth: neon cherry blossoms, acid green meadows where scarlet poppies dance in the sunshine, a skylark soars into the heavens.
In a darkened room an investigation gets under way between the respected obstetrician Nina, (Sukhitashvili), her male colleague (Kinturashvili), and the hospital director (celebrated actor Merab Ninidze). This was apparently an unregistered pregnancy. The woman wanted to give birth naturally, but the medical profession demanded a caesarian. Nina respected the woman’s wishes. Her life is dedicated to serving the female community, above her own private life and, at times, the law.
On an open road travelling into the night Nina harks back to an incident where he sister nearly died in a lake. She felt powerless to help her. Feelings of guilt flood back, overwhelming her once again. The zombie-like figure reappears, an enigmatic motif for Nina’s emotional torture and self-loathing. Motherhood has slipped away from her in this devoutly Orthodox Christian village where bearing children is a woman’s main duty. Her jeep grinds away in heavy mud transporting her high into the mountains to deliver (or kill) the offspring of dutiful women, some of them still in their early teens. And there is one woman, a blind mute, who never had a choice.
Scenes unfold where Nina is clearly present but out of the frame, suggesting her to be enigmatic with complex motives, viewed with suspicion and a questioning supplication by her doctor colleague, a man she once loved, and rejected. He looks into the camera in one of the most emotionally intimate sequences even committed to celluloid: appealing desperately to, Nina, his former lover: “If you don’t want a man in your life, at least have a child”.
Nina is seen visiting a nighttime cattle market where disorientated livestock stare out from their sordid trailers, the farmers circling their prey. Nina defies convention to plow her own lonely furrow. This is her mission in life. She has no choice. April is not an easy film but one you will always remember. @MeredithTaylor
SPECIAL JURY PRIZE | VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2024