Déa Kulumbegashvili’s sophomore film April requires your uncompromising attention. The director, Luca Guadagnino’s protégé, has returned with a piercing but poetic abortion drama set in Georgia. But while recent abortion films – like Happening (2022), Ninjababy (2021), and Never Rarely Sometimes Always (2020) – have broached the topic of abortion from the patient’s perspective, Kulumbegashvili turns the attention to the care provider.

April follows Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili), by day a hospital obstetrician, but at night she drives out to rural Georgian villages to perform outlawed, life-saving abortions. When she’s accused of OB-GYN negligence after a baby is stillborn, Nina is put under investigation and the whispers about her late-night operations grow loud, threatening her job and her safety. “In a way, this film is about the profession of OB-GYN,” Kulumbegashvili tells me, ahead of the film’s screening at 2024’s London Film Festival. “We understand what OB-GYN means, but there is so much space for interpretation that denies women rights over their bodies.” In Georgia, abortion isn’t banned, however, April arrives in the shadow of the Georgian government’s brewing anti-abortion stance, where mounting restrictions pose a deadly threat. 

Articulated with confidently patient extended shots that are quickly becoming Kulumbegashvili’s signature cinematic language, the process of birth is captured in its entirety while an abortion procedure occurs off-screen but Kulumbegashvili frames the rise and fall of a young woman’s abdomen with intense focus. Under Kulumbegashvili’s directorial vision and ​​gifted cinematographer Arseni Khachaturan’s poised camera, the visible and invisible clash with ricocheting tension. 

Ahead of the film’s relese, Kulumbegashvili sat down with Dazed to talk about making April in secret, shooting the abortion scene and why her film won’t be screened in Georgia. 

April joins a recent wave of abortion dramas and while those films are about the patient’s experience, you focus on the care provider. What intrigued you about the perspective of an OB-GYN?

Déa Kulumbegashvili: The care provider is a throughline through the lives of different women. It wasn’t easy building the character. I wanted to be very faithful to people I was meeting in hospitals and they're not very sentimental people and don’t show many emotions but you see that they do care. I wanted to stay faithful [so] I couldn’t create a character who is very emotional, and that’s a problem when you create something for the screen. How is the audience going to connect with somebody who doesn’t display many emotions? Maybe you don’t fully understand how to empathise with Nina, but you can understand how to empathise with the situation or the patients. If you cannot, then maybe it’s the question for you: why don’t you feel anything?

In your debut Beginning and April, you implement these extended shots that are somewhat static. What do you find intriguing about holding these patient shots as the film’s first images?

Déa Kulumbegashvili: The best film for me would be just one shot of looking because there is no such thing as stillness around us. We’re so impatient. I read comments about my film like: ‘This is so pretentious, these shots of nature.’ At what point does the viewer decide ‘I hate these flowers?’ There’s a concept of a Chinese garden which is nature but also construction. If you stay there long enough, it will never be still because the light will always change. I’m an image junkie, but I get so overwhelmed sometimes that stopping and looking at one thing is important.

To that point, the birth scene is so striking and it must have been intense to have one chance to capture that moment. Talk me through the process of preparing to film that scene which is viscerally real but also composed for your camera.

Déa Kulumbegashvili: I was in this hospital for a year and when I was talking to women who were about to give birth, all of their thoughts were about birth. It’s very magical for us but for doctors, it’s just routine. I didn’t want to emphasise anything dramatically because this is the most dramatic moment in life. I wanted to step back [while] filming because when you spend enough time somewhere, you understand how to film things without causing any distraction for people who do a more important job than you. So, we built this separating wall in the room and the [camera] team was behind it. Sometimes we take cinema too seriously, with too much self-importance, and in the maternity clinic, I learned to step back.

Everything is stripped back in those moments. You shoot the birth and abortion scenes with a focus on the body, not the face. What was the thought behind that?

Déa Kulumbegashvili: When you go to medical institutions, the body is more important than the face, the body suffers the most. I want to work with humans as a whole, not just with close-ups of faces – I find that boring cinema, to cut from one close-up to another. That’s a different conversation about the demands of contemporary ways of watching. There’s so much demand for the close-up of the face and I refuse to do that because I don’t think that’s what cinema is.

There’s a lingering anticipation to see a face in pain but it seems more impactful to not see it.

Déa Kulumbegashvili: Why do we need to see it? Not seeing is more important sometimes than seeing. Especially for women to watch this film, do we need to see the face of the woman who goes through abortion to empathise? I don’t think so. And for men, it’s a good time to ask themselves why would they want to see the face. Cinema should create questions. I refuse for cinema to be something which provides a space for a laid-back experience.

I refuse for cinema to be something which provides a space for a laid-back experience

As an audience member today, you come to assume that you’ll get all the answers but you don’t provide those. Has that always been your filmmaking outlook? 

Déa Kulumbegashvili: Yes, I get pissed because as a society, with social media, there is always a demand to be on the right side every moment of your life. We constantly think that if you post or like something you did good, but I just don’t think so. I don’t want to make films which make audience members feel: ‘I paid for the ticket. So I already did something good.’ No, you did not. I don’t want to imitate somebody’s good persona.

Two full-fledged war conflicts are going on right now, but when you go to film festivals [it’s as if] neither is happening. It’s an illusion of the world which does not exist. Is cinema fully an illusion? Those are the questions which I am interested in, I leave myself the right to explore those questions.

The Georgian government has a growing anti-abortion stance and they’ve recently pulled back on LGBTQ+ rights. Yet, Georgian cinema is blossoming in response; with April, Levan Akin’s Crossing (2024) and Alexandre Koberidze’s What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? (2021) How do you view this moment in Georgia cinema?

Déa Kulumbegashvili: I spent a couple of years back at home [in Georgia] during the pandemic and it was very tragic to see that not much has changed. There was an illusion of freedom. Now, that illusion doesn’t exist. Georgia is going into a weird space of dictatorship, it’s a hostile place for people who don’t live in a conventional understanding of what a good woman is. For example, Nina represents a sort of transgression.

Unfortunately, my film will not have any release in Georgia and it’s not going to be positioned as a Georgian film at all. I got zero state funding. Everybody who worked on the film signed NDA contracts and I kept the film extremely secret. Nobody knew I was making it because I wouldn’t be able to make it.

Even last week, something insanely tragic happened… [Kesaria Abramidze, a transgender woman, was murdered in her home a day after the country’s parliament passed a major anti-LGBT bill]. She was my friend and… [Kulumbegashvili takes a breath and wipes her tears]. We thought that we were in a comfortable place where we could at least oppose the government and have power as individuals. In all honesty, I’m just scared for my friends in Georgia.

I honestly think there will be no Georgian cinema in the next couple of years, best-case scenario. It’s the worst position to be in as a director; to make films and feel you created something which gives space for voices that are not heard, but feel powerless. I’m not sure I make any real difference as a director, especially in Georgia. There was one private screening of my film for the crew but it’s impossible to screen in theatres safely.

There’s a precedent for that: when Levan’s film And Then We Danced (2019) screened in Tbilisi it was violently mobbed. 

Déa Kulumbegashvili: It was crazy. At that point, even I felt it was just one marginalised group, not the majority. Now, if I think that this is the majority, then why do we make films? For whom do we make films? I want to believe in my country, but it’s very difficult at the moment. The government fuels and encourages hatred. It’s very dangerous.

To date your films are about Georgian women, is that something you feel you can continue despite this?

Déa Kulumbegashvili: I had thought I would make my next film there, but it’s not possible. I go there and I have citizenship of another country so I can leave but then what about the people who work with me? It’s a bigger dilemma. It’s not about just making a film, it’s about what happens after. I feel trapped as a director. It’s not easy to understand how to make films and not endanger anybody’s life because I don’t want anybody to have problems whatsoever.

I have been talking to some very interesting actors and producers in the United States and there’s a possibility that I can make a film with them. But also, it’s so important for me to involve Georgian actors to provide jobs. Suddenly cinema has become more than just cinema.

April is showing at the BFI London Film Festival 2024 on October 11 and October 12.