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Though there are some quite interesting works to be found at the 59th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, the best film to show there is Dea Kulumbegashvili’s astounding “April.” The second feature from the Georgian director who made the similarly captivating “Beginning” in 2020, the film is one of the most exciting and enrapturing works of cinema in recent memory. It then makes perfect sense that the festival would want Kulumbegashvili to lead an exclusive masterclass for aspiring young filmmakers looking to make their mark.

Following Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili) who works as an Ob-gyn and performs abortions in her own time to those who desperately need them, “April” defies categorization. It approaches the material with an emphasis on more sensory and less conventional storytelling even as it grapples with real issues. After winning the Special Jury Prize at last year’s Venice International Film Festival, the film received a limited U.

As A.I. has become ubiquitous and its creators’ contempt for human-made art has grown louder, questions around what it means to be human in a tech-dominated world have taken on more existentially weighty dimensions. Certainly films have plumbed these questions for decades, but exploring them in new, adventurous ways feels essential in the face of technological forces seeking to stifle, and eventually, eradicate the art form.

Fortunately, filmmakers from around the world have met this challenge with resounding ambition and ingenuity. Two very different films, Carson Lund’s Eephus and Sam Crane and Pinny Grylls’s Grand Theft Hamlet, focus on the need for and power of community in disappearing and unconventional spaces, respectively. Meanwhile, Sarah Friedland’s Familiar Touch grapples with the inevitable decline of the body and mind in old age, while David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds goes one step further, contemplating how grief and technology can...

Tato Kotetishvili’s Holy Electricity headed the winners at the second edition of Georgia’s Eliso film awards.

Holy Electricity received the best film prize, from a seven-person jury that included Agnieszka Holland and Carlos Reygadas.

Scroll down for the full list of winners

The film follows two cousins who discover abandoned crosses in a Tbilisi scrapyard, turning them into neon art which they sell across the Georgian capital. It debuted at Locarno film festival last summer, going on to play Thessaloniki, Tallinn, Goteborg and Rotterdam among others.

Kotetishvili also won the best cinematography award for the film, while he was nominated for best director.

“April” is a film grounded in realism. In the story of Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili), a Georgian Ob-gyn who provides abortions to the women of the neighboring village, the protagonist’s patients are played by first-time performers drawing from their own lives in the rural areas where the film was shot. Writer/director Dea Kulumbegashvili is so detail-oriented that she spent the better part of a year in the hospital, where “April” also filmed, studying the doctors, even convincing them to allow her to capture the birth that opens the film.

“April” is also a formally bold piece of cinema, that breaks from what is expected from social realistist film — most notably in the scenes featuring that unexplained appearance of Nina as the “creature” (Sukhitashvili wearing something akin a less grotesque version of Demi Moore’s “The Substance” prosthetics), which are embued with expressionistic lighting and sound at times are reminscent...

April.A few seconds into April (2024), after an opening crane shot slowly plunges us into a river dappled by rainfall, a mysterious creature shrouded in darkness is seen wading through shallow water. Too humanlike to be an alien and too strange to be a person, it has no distinguishable facial features—no mouth, nose, eyes; a naked mask of flesh roaming a dank, sepulchral void. The unnamed humanoid returns time and time again in Dea Kulumbegashvili’s second film, possibly an alter ego of its protagonist Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili), an expert obstetrician who sometimes moonlights as an illegal abortionist in the hamlets around her town in the Republic of Georgia. Per a 2000 law, abortion can be performed there within the first twelve weeks of pregnancy, though religious stigmas remain in the heavily Orthodox Christian country, as do issues of access for the most vulnerable.After a delivery goes wrong and...

After making its debut at the Venice Film Festival and touring other prestigious autumn festivals like Toronto, San Sebastian, London BFI, and NYFF, it was at Sundance where I finally had the opportunity to speak with Dea Kulumbegashvili about what could very well be our top film of 2024. Titled “April,” the film is set to be released by Metrograph Pictures in—you guessed it—April. Reuniting with cinematographer Arseni Khachaturan and lead actress Ia Sukhitashvili — the trio previously collaborated on Kulumbegashvili’s masterful 2020 debut, “Beginning,” the film transports us to the stunning yet challenging rural landscapes of Eastern Georgia.…...

It’s not unusual to say that something cuts through the silence but in Dea Kulumbegashvili’s April it’s the silence that cuts through us. Both it and negative space are weaponised by the Georgian director’s character study of obstetrician gynecologist Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili), who in addition to helping children into the world in the hospital where she works, also carries out secret abortions for desperate women in rural areas, which though not strictly outlawed, are hard to come by and considered religiously shameful.

Kulumbegashvili’s study of Nina’s psyche goes beyond the intensity of watching her go about her business to a creature we meet in the film’s opening scenes, which – and this is wide open to viewer interpretation – may well represent her inner conflict and feelings of guilt. It’s a strange and sagging faceless creation, humanoid but with skin folding in disturbing ways,...

Editor’s Note: This review was originally published during the 2024 Venice Film Festival. Metrograph Pictures releases “April” in select theaters Friday, April 25.

There isn’t a horror director alive who wouldn’t kill to create frames as tense, ominous, and viscerally captivating as those of Georgian filmmaker Dea Kulumbegashvili, who applies her talents toward elemental character studies about rural women suffering under the yoke of patriarchy at the foot of the Caucasus Mountains.

Her debut feature, 2020’s masterful “Beginning,” tells the story of a disillusioned Jehovah’s Witness who starts to unravel after her church is firebombed by extremists in the very first shot, a static tableau held for several minutes before its Haneke-like remove is shattered with a molotov cocktail. Kulumbegashvili’s even more accomplished and terrifying follow-up “April” — which concerns a hospital obstetrician whose career is put at risk when a rare stillbirth threatens to expose her unsanctioned...

“The director’s place is very humble in the process of making a film,” reflects Georgian filmmaker Dea Kulumbegashvili on the making of her sophomore feature, April. It’s a realization that she pinpoints specifically to a striking shot early in the film in which she and cinematographer Arseni Khachaturan capture a real-life childbirth. For such a fastidious researcher and planner, the experience of learning the limits of her control provided an education in letting go of her best-laid plans and to, well, let life in.

Like many a great filmmaker wielding aesthetic austerity with scalpel-like precision, Kulumbegashvili’s approach isn’t antiseptic. With April, like Beginning before it, the filmmaker tasks other people to fully supply the humanity of the film. That onus lies as heavily with those inside her carefully composed frames as it does on the viewers who gaze at them.

Throughout April, the camera dwells on...

T.S. Eliot said April was the cruelest month, but that’s hardly the case for this April 2025, when Dea Kulumbegashvili’s shattering new drama “April” finally opens.

Ok, to be fair, “April” is a cruel film, set in a remote Georgian village, where a revered obstetrician is accused of malpractice and ostracized by her townspeople after a baby dies on the delivery table. Meanwhile, she provides illegal abortions for the village’s broken, young, and helpless women. IndieWire shares the exclusive trailer below for the film, which won a Venice Film Festival 2024 special prize from a jury headed up by none other than Isabelle Huppert. Rising distributor Metrograph Pictures, which also operates a brick-and-mortar theater in Lower Manhattan, opens the film in select cities on April 25.

“April” reunites Kulumbegasvhili with actress Ia Sukhitashvili, who starred in the director’s 2020 breakout “Beginning,” about religious extremism and abuse, also set in a Georgian village.

"Other than my job, I have nothing to lose." BFI has unveiled an official trailer for a peculiar Georgian art house film titled April, the second feature film from director Dea Kulumbegashvili. This first premiered at last year's Venice Film Festival, where it won a Special Jury Prize before playing at other film fests last fall. Nina works in the only small hospital of a provincial town as their Ob-gyn. Single and in abstinence from personal relationships, she is unconditionally devoted to her Hippocratic oath. When a newborn dies within seconds of being delivered under her supervision, she is accused of wrongdoings. Under investigation, every detail of Nina's personal & professional life is being scrutinized. Despite the risks, Nina remains devoted to her duty as a doctor, committed to doing what nobody else will. Starring Ia Sukhitashvili as Nina, with Kakha Kintsurashvili, Merab Ninidze, Roza Kancheishvili, and Ana Nikolava. Some critics...

Film is so back. Shooting on Kodak film continues to be both a more popular choice among filmmakers and to gather more Oscar prestige. At this year’s Academy Awards Sean Baker’s Best Picture winner, “Anora,” was shot on 35mm by cinematographer Drew Daniels; Brady Corbet’s Best Cinematography winner, “The Brutalist,” was shot on 35mm VistaVision to great aplomb by Dp Lol Crawley; Walter Salles’ Best International Feature Film winner, “I’m Still Here,” was shot on both 35mm and S8mm by cinematographer Adrian Teijido; and the Best Live Action Short winner, “I’m Not a Robot,” was also shot on 35mm.

This year looks set to build on that success. There will be a cohort of prominent movies captured on film from some of the usual analog-loving directors: Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners,” Luca Guadagnino’s “After the Hunt,” Wes Anderson’s “The Phoenician Scheme,” Yorgos Lanthimos’ “Bugonia,” Josh Safdie’s “Marty Supreme,...

Dea Kulumbegashvili’s sophomore feature April unfolds like a haunting meditation, demanding its audience to sit within the discomfort of its silences and the enormity of its questions. The film centers on Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili), an Ob-gyn in Georgia, whose quiet defiance of the country’s legal prohibitions on abortion places her in a precarious position both personally and professionally.

A deeply introspective character study, April goes beyond the limitations of narrative conventions, instead employing a cinematic language that feels tactile, immersive, and unflinchingly intimate. Through layered observational editing, deliberate pacing, and soundscapes that envelop the viewer, Kulumbegashvili evokes an atmosphere that is as unsettling as it is deeply human. At its core, the film interrogates not only the fragile position of women in Georgia’s deeply traditional society where expectations of women are shaped by generational norms and community values, but also the moral and emotional toll of existing...

In April, the sophomore feature from Georgian filmmaker Dea Kulumbegashvili, a small-town obstetrician (Ia Sukhitashvili) comes under scrutiny when a baby dies during delivery. The investigation, spearheaded by the father of the deceased infant, threatens to also expose the young woman’s clandestine abortion operation. Cinematographer Arseni Khachaturan tells Filmmaker about shooting a live birth scene, her recurring collaboration with Kulumbegashvili and the team’s naturalistic approach to lighting. See all responses to our annual Sundance cinematographer interviews here. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the cinematographer of your film? What were the factors and attributes that led to your […]

The post “A Feeling of Endless Night”: Dp Arseni Khachaturan on April first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

In April, the sophomore feature from Georgian filmmaker Dea Kulumbegashvili, a small-town obstetrician (Ia Sukhitashvili) comes under scrutiny when a baby dies during delivery. The investigation, spearheaded by the father of the deceased infant, threatens to also expose the young woman’s clandestine abortion operation. Cinematographer Arseni Khachaturan tells Filmmaker about shooting a live birth scene, her recurring collaboration with Kulumbegashvili and the team’s naturalistic approach to lighting. See all responses to our annual Sundance cinematographer interviews here. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the cinematographer of your film? What were the factors and attributes that led to your […]

The post “A Feeling of Endless Night”: Dp Arseni Khachaturan on April first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

The penultimate Sundance Film Festival held in Park City, Utah—and the first held since the fest announced that it was shopping around for a new home—2025’s edition begins a two-year farewell to the slopes by rolling out a familiar slate of documentaries, daring Next selections, indie dramas with exactly one high-profile star,...

If April was the cruelest month for T.S. Eliot, this upcoming one’s certainly less cruel for filmgoers with a new movie called “April” finally hitting theaters.

As IndieWire can exclusive announce, Dea Kulumbegashvili’s 2024 Venice Special Jury prize winner “April” will open from Metrograph Pictures on April 25 in select theaters.

Since it’s been a while since we saw “April” at the fall festivals, here’s the synopsis courtesy of Metrograph Pictures: “Skilled obstetrician Nina is accused of malpractice when a baby dies during delivery. The ensuing investigation threatens to expose Nina’s illegal sideline: offering abortions to local women. Nina remains fiercely committed to her patients, but she must walk a razor’s edge in order to survive as a pariah in a world which desperately needs her. Set against the backdrop of the starkly beautiful Georgian countryside, Kulumegashvili’s prescient sophomore employs a mesmerizing visual and sonic...

Georgian film April, directed by Dea Kulumbegashvili, has won both the Best Film and Best Performance prizes at the 17th Asia Pacific Screen Awards (Apsa), held in Australia.

The film tells the story of Nina, an obstetrician-gynecologist, who faces accusations after a newborn’s death. Ia Sukhitashvili won the Best Performance award for her portrayal of Nina.

The Best Director accolade went to Tato Kotetishvili for debut feature Holy Electricity, which is a Georgia-Netherlands co-production. The dark comedy follows two cousins selling neon crucifixes door to door in Tbilisi.

The Jury Grand Prize went to All We Imagine as Light, which is the second feature from India’s Payal Kapadia. The film follows two working-class nurses amid the nocturnal landscape of Mumbai.

Best Youth Film went to India’s Lakshmipriya Devi for Boong, alongside producers Alan McAlex, Vikesh Bhutani, Ritesh Sidhwani, Farhan Akhtar and Shujaat Saudagar.

Best Animated Film went...

Dea Kulumbegashvili’s April scored a double win at the 17th Asia Pacific Screen Awards (Apsa), taking home prizes for best film and best performance for Ia Sukhitashvili.

The Georgian feature centres on a skilled obstetrician at a maternity hospital, who comes under scrutiny after a tragic episode, threatening her secret side job providing unsanctioned abortions. The film premiered at Venice where it won the special jury prize and went on to play Toronto and San Sebastian, winning best film in Zabaltegi-Tabakalera competition at the latter. Metrograph Pictures picked up North American rights last month.

Scroll down for full list...

Georgian drama film “April” took double honors on Saturday at the annual Asia Pacific Screen Awards, winning the best film prize and the best performance prize for Ia Sukhitashvili.

Directed by Dea Kulumbegashvili, the film portrays the determination of an obstetrics and gynaecology provider in the face of accusations about the death of a newborn child. The film premiered at the Venice and Toronto festivals in September, earning a special jury prize in Venice and the best film prize in the Zabaltegi-Tabakalera competition.

Sukhitashvili was present at the Apsa ceremony in Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia, to accept both awards.

Fellow Georgian filmmaker, Tato Kotetishvili was awarded the Apsa for best director for his debut feature, dark comedy “Holy Electricity,” which sees cousins selling neon crucifixes door to door in Tbilisi.

Women’s stories and films from India were also major themes among the awards winners.

Payal Kapadia’s “All We Imagine as Light,...

Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine As Light and Dea Kulumbegashvili’s April head the nominations for the 17th Asia Pacific Screen Awards (Apsa), each securing nods in five categories.

Both will compete for best film, best director, best screenplay, best cinematography and best performance at the awards, which will be presented on November 30 at a ceremony on Australia’s Gold Coast.

Scroll down for full list of nominations

All We Imagine As Light, billed as an ode to nocturnal Mumbai, premiered in Competition at Cannes, where it won the festival’s grand prix. April, the story of a Georgian ob-gyn who faces accusations,...

Two films by women directors, Payal Kapadia’s ‘All We Imagine as Light’ and Dea Kulumbegashvili’s ‘April’ lead the nominations for the Asia Pacific Screen Awards.

Both films will compete in five categories – best film, best director, best screenplay, best cinematography and best performance – it was revealed Wednesday in a nominations announcement.

Also competing for best film are Yoko Yamanaka’s Tokyo-set story of a young woman’s mental illness, “Desert of Namibia” (Japan); Neo Sora’s future Tokyo tale of perilous social surveillance “Happyend”; and Jiang Xiaoxuan’s “To Kill a Mongolian Horse”, a portrait of a Mongolian horseman turned performer, based on a true story.

Four of the five films nominated for best film are from female directors, and in an Apsa first, all five best film contenders are first or second features.

In addition to Kapadia, Kulumbegashvili and Jiang, the nominees for best director include Tato Kotetishvili for “Holy Electricity,...

It wasn’t just live births that filmmaker Dea Kulumbegashvili witnessed while researching her new abortion odyssey “April” in a remote Georgia hospital. She saw something else that still haunts her — and the project.

The filmmaker was embedded in the hospital during pre-production when a woman was brought in on the edge of death. The man accompanying the victim claimed a gas leak had poisoned her, but as Kulumbegashvili and everyone around her soon learned, this man had actually murdered the woman. And Kulumbegashvili knew the victim. And the killer. And the chief of police who arrested and then attacked him.

“It took me a long time to decide how much of it could be part of the film,” the Georgian filmmaker, who now lives in Berlin but returned to her childhood village of Lagodekhi to make her extraordinary Venice prize winner, told IndieWire during the New York Film Festival.

Metrograph Pictures has acquired North American rights to Dea Kulumbegashvili’s Venice Special Jury Prize winner April ahead of its US premiere at New York Film Festival on October 7.

Kulumbegashvili’s second film has played Toronto and San Sebastian and centres on Nina, a skilled obstetrician at a maternity hospital in Eastern Georgia, who comes under scrutiny after a tragic episode, threatening her secret side job providing unsanctioned abortions.

April reunites Kulumbegashvili with actors Ia Sukhitashvili and Kakha Kintsurashvili from Beginning. Metrograph Pictures plans a 2025 theatrical release on the drama from Frenesy Film, First Picture, Memo Films, and Independent Film Project.

Metrograph Pictures has acquired North American rights for Dea Kulumbegashvili’s Venice Special Jury prizewinner “April.”

The festival standout earned unanimous critical praise upon world premiering at Venice with Variety describing it as a “radical, shattering exploration of women’s lives, rights and bodies in peril.” The film, which received a prize from a Venice jury presided over by Isabelle Huppert, went on to play at Toronto and San Sebastian where it also nabbed an award. It will next screen at the New York Film Festival as part of its main slate. Metrograph Pictures will release the film in theaters next year.

“April” follows Nina, a skilled obstetrician at a maternity hospital in Eastern Georgia. “After a difficult delivery, an infant dies and the grief-stricken father demands an inquiry into her methods. The resulting scrutiny threatens to bring to light Nina’s secret side job—driving through the stunningly beautiful...

Dea Kulumbegashvili wastes no time establishing the aesthetic extremes to which her film April will stretch. The opening shot lingers on a lurking humanoid creature in a lightless, liminal space. Arseni Khachaturan’s camera remains still and detached while observing this figure with droopy—and seemingly decaying—skin as it lumbers into the shadows.

The mysterious entity reappears sporadically throughout the film, but the focus of April quickly shifts toward a more familiar nonverbal being. Only an interstitial sequence of pouring rain separates that abstraction from a jarring take of realism where a god’s-eye view captures an unsimulated live birth in a delivery room. Within 10 minutes, Kulumbegashvili bridges a stylistic range from Jonathan Glazer’s formalism to Cristian Mungiu’s naturalism.

While April, Kulumbegashvili’s follow-up to Beginning, may be a film defined by its contrasts, the filmmaker never presents them as contradictions. Any paired oppositions in the film—life and death,...

Isabelle Huppert, Hong Sang-soo favourite stars in New York Film Festival highlight A Traveler’s Need Photo: Anne Katrin Titze

Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist (co-written with Mona Fastvold and Silver Lion Best Director winner at the Venice International Film Festival), starring Adrien Brody with Felicity Jones, Guy Pearce, Stacy Martin, Joe Alwyn, Raffey Cassidy, Emma Laird, Isaach De Bankolé, and Alessandro Nivola; Mohammad Rasoulof’s The Seed Of The Sacred Fig with Soheila Golestani, Mahsa Rostami, Setareh Maleki, Niousha Akhshi, and Missagh Zareh; Dea Kulumbegashvili’s April (Special Jury Prize in Venice) with Ia Sukhitashvili, plus Hong Sang-soo’s By The Stream, starring Kwon Haehyo, Kim Minhee, and Cho Yunhee and his A Traveler’s Needs (winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the Berlin Film Festival) starring Isabelle Huppert, round out the five early bird highlights in the Main Slate program...

Dea Kulumbegashvili’s entrancing second feature grew partly out of preparations for her first, Beginning, when she cast children in Georgia and met mothers who married quite young and had large families. In April, Ia Sukhitashvili (the lead in Beginning) plays Nina, a leading obstetrician at a maternity clinic in eastern Georgia who delivers babies at the hospital and also secretly travels to houses in the countryside to perform abortions. But while there are social and legal complications to providing these services, as envisioned by Kulumbegashvili Nina’s story transcends conventional drama to be a sometimes hyperreal, sometimes enigmatic journey through darkness […]

The post “The Distributors Point the Finger at the Streamers”: Dea Kulumbegashvili on April first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Dea Kulumbegashvili’s entrancing second feature grew partly out of preparations for her first, Beginning, when she cast children in Georgia and met mothers who married quite young and had large families. In April, Ia Sukhitashvili (the lead in Beginning) plays Nina, a leading obstetrician at a maternity clinic in eastern Georgia who delivers babies at the hospital and also secretly travels to houses in the countryside to perform abortions. But while there are social and legal complications to providing these services, as envisioned by Kulumbegashvili Nina’s story transcends conventional drama to be a sometimes hyperreal, sometimes enigmatic journey through darkness […]

The post “The Distributors Point the Finger at the Streamers”: Dea Kulumbegashvili on April first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Apocalypse in the Tropics

Venice, Telluride

Brazilian documentarian Petra Costa chronicles the dire state of democracy with this eye-opening exposé, delving into the troubling ties linking Christian evangelism and politics. Getting up close and personal with some powerful people amid a wave of social and political unrest, she shifts between the epic and the intimate, history and the present, to shed light on a phenomenon not only in her home nation, but around the world. — Jordan Mintzer

April

Venice, Toronto

Dea Kulumbegashvili’s miraculous feature centers on an Ob-gyn (a marvelous Ia Sukhitashvili) who performs secret abortions for desperate women in deepest rural Georgia. Like Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, the drama emphasizes the risks of backstreet terminations as well as the shame and expense that prevent access. Offsetting the grimness of it all are bouts of transcendent beauty. — Leslie Felperin

Babygirl

Venice, Toronto

A spectacular Nicole Kidman...

Don’t let the name fool you: “April” is a wintery affair. By far the most uncompromising vision to play at this year’s Venice Film Festival, director Dea Kulumbegashvili’s slow cinema horror show might also be the most audacious. That audacity translates less by way of length or provocation – Brady Corbet’s “The Brutalist” and Harmony Korine’s “Baby Invasion” have those laurel locked up – than by way of self-assurance, from the filmmaker’s steadfast belief in her own creative gambit to her audience’s willingness to immerse themselves within.

This is, in so many words, a swing for auteur enshrinement so crystalline in intent that it namedrops Mikhail Kalatozov’s “The Cranes Are Flying” and visually cites Jonathan Glazer’s “Under the Skin” from the very jump.

Kulumbegashvili can reasonably wager on her film’s long-term prospects once it meets the right crowd, but the diverging festival...

Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili), a respected Ob-gyn, performs secret abortions for desperate women in deepest rural Georgia (the ex-Soviet nation, not the American state) in April, Georgian director Dea Kulumbegashvili’s wrenching second feature. As with her previous Beginning, which also starred Sukhitashvili, Kulumbegashvili marbles gritty realism in the vein of the Romanian New Wave (long takes, implicit social criticism, hyper-naturalistic performances) with a fantastical element that might be the projection of the main character’s troubled mind, a stray symbol or just a bit of experimental legerdemain.

The surreal bolt-on doesn’t work all that well, but the limpid cinematography and more quotidian dramatic elements are impactful and striking enough to distinguish this as one of the stronger films to emerge this fall festival season. April debuts in competition in Venice and will spend part of September and beyond at fests in Toronto, San Sebastian and New York.

With laws...

Abortion in Georgia is officially legal, though it may as well not be. A woman may request a termination up to 12 weeks into her pregnancy, but given the vehemence of public and political opposition to the practice, she’s unlikely to find a clinic that will agree to perform it. It’s a phantom right, then, its yes-but-no deception just one of the manifold ways in which women’s lives are curbed and constricted by a world that promises more liberty than it grants.

An expert obstetrician in a hard-up patch of Eastern Georgia, Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili) has become stoically accustomed to this oppression, using her abilities and relative social privilege to work around it where she can. But years of chafing against the system have come at considerable cost to her inner life — and even, in the most nightmarish interludes of Dea Kulumbegashvili’s staggering sophomore feature “April,” her very sense of personhood.

A new film by Georgian director Dea Kulumbegashvili will premiere this week at the Venice Film Festival, promising to spark important discussions about women’s healthcare access in rural Georgia. Titled “April,” the film focuses on Nina, a local doctor who secretly provides illegal abortions for women in need. During production, Georgia introduced new restrictions on abortion, further complicating rural women’s access to care.

The movie follows Nina, an obstetrician-gynecologist played by Ia Sukhitashvili, as she assists impoverished women in remote villages. While facing an investigation over a stillbirth, Nina continues aiding women through illegal abortions since many rural hospitals lack adequate resources. The director shadowed real medical professionals for months to authentically capture their daily challenges. “They have so much empathy. They’re so dedicated to their profession,” Kulumbegashvili said of the overworked doctors.

Kulumbegashvili’s interest in rural women’s health issues arose from scouting trips for her previous film.

Exclusive: Georgian director Dea Kulumbegashvili’s second feature April world premieres in competition at the Venice Film Festival later this week, before heading to Toronto and New York.

The drama about a rural obstetrician-gynecologist who performs illegal abortions for women in need, follows Kulumbegashvili’s breakthrough debut feature Beginning, starring Ia Sukhitashvili as the wife of a Jehovah’s Witness leader disillusioned with the patriarchal religious community.

Set in and around Kulumbegashvili’s hometown of Lagodekhi at the foot of the Greater Caucasus mountains, that film won San Sebastian’s Golden Shell for Best Film in 2020 and was also feted by TIFF and Tribeca among others, heralding the director as a talent to watch.

Related: ‘The Room Next Door’s Pedro Almodóvar, Julianne Moore & Tilda Swinton Talk Life, Death, Euthanasia, Female Friendships – Venice Film Festival

April sees Kulumbegashvili return to Lagodekhi and reunite with Sukhitashvili as well as producers Ilan Amouyal...

Una médico obstetra es acusada de mala praxis. © Ssiff

La película de la directora georgiana Dea Kulumbegashvili, April, que compite en el Festival Internacional de Cine de Venecia en unos días, también pasará por el Festival de San Sebastián clausurando la sección Zabaltegi-Tabakalera.

April sigue a Nina mientras trabaja en el único pequeño hospital de una ciudad de provincias como ginecóloga obstetra. Soltera y reacia a implicarse en relaciones personales, es fiel a su juramento hipocrático, pero cuando un bebé muere a los pocos segundos de nacer bajo su supervisión, Nina es acusada de mala praxis. En la investigación, cada detalle de la vida personal y profesional de Nina es objeto de escrutinio.

La película, protagonizada por Ia Sukhitashvili, Kakha Kintsurashvili y Merab Ninidze, es el segundo largometraje de la cineasta, cuyo debut, Beginning, estrenada en 2020, se alzó con cuatro galardones en San Sebastián: la Concha de Oro a la...

Cinema has always had a way of opening unfamiliar places up to the world––if not always for a visit, then at least in the imaginations of those watching. The success of Georgian cinema in the last few years has come at a time when the country’s political future (and the possibility for that openness) seems up for grabs: on one side, a new generation leaning toward the West; on the other, a ruling party (improbably named Georgian Dream) attempting to buck the trend––and with an ally in the East willing to lend a hand. In the new film Panopticon, that fraught political moment is mirrored in a young man’s coming-of-age as he attempts to swim against the sexual, religious, and societal forces threatening to pull him under.

The story takes place in a village near Tbilisi, where the 18-year-old Sandro (Data Chachua) lives alone with his elderly grandmother,...

To begin with, Georgian writer-director George Sikharulidze’s debut feature places us mercilessly right into the last place on earth most of us would ever want to find ourselves: the lanky, concave frame and warped, self-loathing mindset of an incipient incel.

Eighteen-year-old Sandro (remarkable newcomer Data Chachua) is a creep: a surreptitious groper in public places, a gawky loner at the football club where he trains, and a sulky checked-out student in his final year of high school. But Sikharulidze’s clever screenplay soon deepens and complicates his characterization, making him quietly emblematic of the masculinity crisis being navigated by Georgia’s younger generation, in which modern, progressive values do battle with sexism, right-wing ideology and a strain of ancient religious hypocrisy that leaches like a toxin into the bloodstream of the body social. “Panopticon” may not have quite the all-seeing eye its title implies, but its gaze is piercing and sharp and strange.

Other titles include Dea Kulumbegashvili’s new film and ’Like A Son’ starring Vincent Lindon.

Goodfellas, the Paris-based sales company formerly known as Wild Bunch International, has unveiled a lively slate of titles ahead of Cannes, including starry period drama The Flood, Dea Kulumbegashvili’s Those Who Find Me, French social drama Like A Son, prison drama Inside, football documentary Napoli 1990, Napoli 2023 and Spanish thriller When The Party’s Over, along with several titles in Cannes’ Official Selection.

The Flood is the second feature from Italian director Gianluca Jodice following The Bad Poet and stars Mélanie Laurent and Guillaume Canet as...

Beginning Mubi Reviewed for Shockya.com & BigAppleReviews.net linked from Rotten Tomatoes by: Harvey Karten Director: Dea Kulumbegashvili Writer: Dea Kulumbegashvili, Rati Oneli Cast: Ia Sukhitashvili, Rati Oneli, Kakha Kintsurashvili, Saba Gogichaishvili Screened at: Critics’ link, NYC, 2/4/21 Opens: January 29, 2021 One of the long gags about the Jehovah’s Witnesses in the U.S. is that […]

The post Beginning Movie Review appeared first on Shockya.com.

At the midpoint of her astounding first feature “Beginning,” Georgian writer-director Dea Kulumbegashvili pulls off a brazen formalist coup that will either envelop you entirely in its world or freeze you out for good. On a glimmering autumn afternoon, put-together mother Yana (Ia Sukhitashvili) goes strolling with her pre-teen son Giorgi (Saba Gogichaishvili) in local woodlands, pausing at a leaf-carpeted clearing, where ringing birdsong and insect chatter fuse into a kind of white noise. Carefully, she lies down and closes her eyes. For six minutes, across one unbroken, tightly framed shot, we watch her rest, playing dead when her son tries to rouse her; eventually, the soundtrack of nature is subsumed by the quiet of her mind, briefly at peace.

“Beginning” contains more jolting provocations on either side of this pristine long take, but none quite so breathtaking. Some may dismiss it as an indulgent stunt, but viewers receptive to...

With a seemingly endless amount of streaming options—not only the titles at our disposal, but services themselves–each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit platforms. Check out this week’s selections below and past round-ups here.

Beginning (Dea Kulumbegashvili)

Originally a Cannes selection, then coming to San Sebastian, TIFF, and NYFF where it picked up deserved awards, the Georgian film Beginning is a difficult, sometimes brutal film to watch and then unpack. Déa Kulumbegashvili’s debut is a look at the confines, both religious and familial, put on one woman’s (Ia Sukhitashvili) life as she wrestles with outer and inner demons. Both a lonely and patient film, Beginning acts as mirror and portal, creating turmoil and strife for audience and subject. Challenging yet rewarding, Beginning is phenomenal. – Michael F.

Where to Stream: Mubi (free for 30 days)

The Dig (Simon Stone)

When Simon Stone’s...

This Georgia-set film about the firebombing of a Jehovah’s Witness prayer house and the subsequent rape of a local woman is intense but inert

This is the much-admired feature debut of Georgian director Dea Kulumbegashvili, part of the official selection for last year’s cancelled Cannes film festival, where it might well have been a shock-cinema talking point had the event gone ahead. It is co-produced by the Mexican film-maker Carlos Reygadas, whose influence is very apparent, and the movie as a whole is an intensely, indeed overbearingly, curated and controlled experience. It is a succession of disquieting tableaux, shot mainly from fixed camera positions in which the relevant action can be happening very far away, and one of the speakers can be off-camera for long periods: a cinema in the high style of Haneke, Farhadi and Kiarostami.

Yana (Ia Sukhitashvili) and David are a devout Jehovah’s Witness...

CAA has signed filmmaker Déa Kulumbegashvili, whose film “Beginning” is Georgia’s submission for best international feature at the 2021 Oscars.

“Beginning” marks Kulumbegashvili’s feature directorial debut and has made major waves along the film festival circuit since its debut last fall at the Toronto International Film Festival, where the film won the Fipresci Prize. An official selection by the Cannes Film Festival, the project also swept the best film, director, actress and screenplay prizes at the San Sebastian Film Festival; and was featured on the main slate at the New York Film Festival.

Born and raised in Georgia, Kulumbegashvili studied film at Columbia University, and previously screened her short films “Invisible Spaces” (2014) and “Léthé” (2016) at Cannes.

“Beginning” stars Ia Sukhitashvili as Yana, the wife of the community leader in a sleepy provincial town in Georgia. When the Jehovah Witness community is attacked by an extremist group and Yana’s outer world begins to crumble,...

In “Beginning,” a gut punch of a drama out of Georgia that takes austerity to extremes, a woman has a psychological and spiritual breakdown after an attack on her rural place of worship rocks her village. Dea Kulumbegashvili’s feature debut was one of the most talked-about films of the 2020 festival circuit, with the jury in San Sebastian led by director Luca Guadagnino awarding it Best Screenplay, Best Director, Best Actress, and the Golden Shell for Best Film. The film, which is also Georgia’s submission for the 2021 Best International Feature Academy Award, finally begins streaming stateside courtesy of Mubi on January 29.

Ia Sukhitashvili plays Yana, the wife of a community leader who faces hostility after the attack, and the intrusion of a detective in her life who brings with him harrowing consequences. The film is set within a sleepy town of Jehovah’s Witnesses who provide an unsettling backdrop to Yana’s crisis,...

"This is not the first incident." Mubi has unveiled an official US trailer for an indie film titled Beginning, an award-winning debut feature from Georgian filmmaker Dea Kulumbegashvili. It premiered at the Toronto, New York, & San Sebastian Film Festivals last fall, and won tons of awards including Best Film in San Sebastian and the Fipresci Prize at TIFF. In a sleepy provincial town, a Jehovah Witness community is attacked by an extremist group. In the midst of this conflict, the familiar world of Yana, the wife of the community leader, slowly crumbles. From Mubi: "One of the most striking debuts in recent memory, Dea Kulumbegashvili's feature marks the revelation of an exciting new voice in cinema. Shot in luminous 35mm long takes that boldly evoke isolation and longing, it tells a profound story of a woman's resilience facing communal hostility and violence." Starring Ia Sukhitashvili & Kakha Kintsurashvili. This is one...

Dea Kulumbegashvili, who grew up in the remote Caucasus Mountains of the newly-independent nation of Georgia, must be getting used to being a trail-blazer.

In 2016, she became the first Georgian director to have a film accepted in Cannes — her stunning minimalist short Invisible Spaces. In 2020, her feature debut, Beginning, would have been the first Georgian feature to premiere on the Croisette, if Covid-19 hadn’t shut Cannes down. Instead, Kulumbegashvili took the drama to Toronto and San Sebastian. The movie is a stark vision of Yana [Ia Sukhitashvili], a woman who has married into an insular Jehovah’s Witness ...

Dea Kulumbegashvili, who grew up in the remote Caucasus Mountains of the newly-independent nation of Georgia, must be getting used to being a trail-blazer.

In 2016, she became the first Georgian director to have a film accepted in Cannes — her stunning minimalist short Invisible Spaces. In 2020, her feature debut, Beginning, would have been the first Georgian feature to premiere on the Croisette, if Covid-19 hadn’t shut Cannes down. Instead, Kulumbegashvili took the drama to Toronto and San Sebastian. The movie is a stark vision of Yana [Ia Sukhitashvili], a woman who has married into an insular Jehovah’s Witness ...

Georgian director Dea Kulumbegashvili, whose film “Beginning” is her country’s Oscar entry, thought Covid-19 was the reason why there were so few people backstage when the San Sebastian Film Festival jury, headed by Luca Guadagnino, was awarding its prizes. “Backstage there were only two other film teams.”

For the next hour, the 34-year-old would trundle onto the stage four times as her outstanding debut film picked up the Golden Shell award for best film, director, actress for Ia Sukhitashvili, and screenplay for Kulumbegashvili and co-writer Rati Oneli, who also plays a role.

“I just thought I was there to pick up the best actress prize, as we knew we won that in advance because Ia needed to record a video,” Kulumbegashvili told Variety in a Paris cafe.

Afterwards, she chatted with Guadagnino and his jury members. “They wanted to talk to me about what the future of the film could be,...

Dea Kulumbegashvili’s debut feature Beginning (Main Slate selection of the New York Film Festival), co-written with Rati Oneli, executive produced by Carlos Reygadas and Gaetan Rousseau, stars Ia Sukhitashvili with Oneli and Kakha Kintsurashvili. Matthieu Taponier, the editor of László Nemes’s Oscar-winning film Son Of Saul, starring Géza Röhrig, was also the editor and co-writer with Nemes and Clara Royer on Sunset (Napszállta), featuring Juli Jakab and Vlad Ivanov. Taponier edited Beginning, shot by Arseni Khachaturan with music by Nicolas Jaar.

Beginning begins in a small Jehovah's Witness prayer house in rural Georgia. The woman Yana (Ia Sukhitashvili) whose story this is, greets the congregation one by one as they enter. The carpet is red, the people are happy to attend. Yana’s husband David (Rati Oneli) gives the sermon about Abraham and Isaac, and asks if Abraham was really intent on killing Isaac, his...