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"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...

BFI Distribution has picked up UK-Ireland rights toDea Kulumbegashvili’s second feature, April, from Goodfellas and is planning a release in spring 2025.

Aprildebuted in competition at Venice where it won the special jury prize ahead of playing at Toronto, San Sebastian and the BFI London Film Festival. It is now set to play at Sundance and Göteborg.

It is about the fallout from the enquiry into the death of a baby during childbirth at a maternity hospital in Georgia which reveals the doctor’s secret other job, providing unsanctioned abortions.

The film starsla Sukhitashvili and Kakha Kintsurashvili, who also appeared inKulumbegashvili’s 2020 debut,...

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,...

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.

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...

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...

"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’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...

Ia Sukhitashvili stars in Dea Kulumbegashvili's Beginning

Dea Kulumbegashvili’s debut feature Beginning, 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.

Koné Bakary in Night Of The Kings

During the Rethinking World Cinema panel discussion with Chaitanya Tamhane (The Disciple), Philippe Lacôte (Night of the Kings), Louis Henderson and Olivier Marboeuf (Ouvertures) at the New York Film Festival, I sent in the following comment and question for Dea Kulumbegashvili: You worked with Matthieu Taponier, the editor of László Nemes’s Son Of Saul and Sunset. Can you talk about your collaboration with him?...

Georgian-French drama Beginning (Dasatskisi) was the big winner at the San Sebastian Film Festival, winning the top prize Golden Shell at last night’s awards ceremony.

The buzzed-about arthouse film from first-timer Dea Kulumbegashvili also won Best Director, Best Actress and Best Screenplay awards. We debuted first footage for the film earlier this month.

Kulumbegashvili wrote the script with Rati Oneli. Starring are Ia sukhitashvili (best actress winner), Rati Oneli and Kakha Kintsurashvili. Producers are Ilan Amouyal, Rati Oneli and David Zerat. Music comes from Dheepan and Ema composer Nicolas Jaar. Wild Bunch handles sales.

The film charts the story of a persecuted family of Jehovah’s Witness missionaries from the perspective of a wife and mother. Following a shocking act of arson on the place of worship she and her husband have established in a remote village outside of Tbilisi, Yana (Sukhitashvili) finds herself descending into a spiral of confusion and doubt,...

Beginning, Dea Kulumbegashvili’s debut feature, announces its director’s arrival on the arthouse scene with several bangs. In a lengthy opening shot, a group of Jehovah’s Witnesses in a rural Georgian community have their service interrupted by someone throwing molotov cocktails in their church. Everyone gets out alive, but the building gets reduced to ash and the (Orthodox Christian) townspeople won’t help them. Within several shots, Kulumbegashvili establishes the setting, story, tense mood, and her own precise style by shooting on 35mm in Academy ratio.

It takes some time before the film hones in on Yana (Ia Sukhitashvili), the wife of priest David (Rati Oneli), and their fracturing relationship. She’s experiencing an existential crisis as a result of putting aside her own dreams to stick to the faith and her husband. David goes on a trip to convince the elders to provide funds for rebuilding, and...