“I don’t exist as a director in Georgia”: Dea Kulumbegashvili on her haunting abortion drama April

Dea Kulumbegashvili’s debut feature, Beginning (2020) announced a new voice in Georgian filmmaking from its opening scene with the sight of a Molotov cocktail smashing through the window of a Jehovah’s Witness hall, engulfing a terrified congregation in smoke as they try to escape the flames. Though the film appeared in the lost 2020 Covid Cannes, Kulumbegashvili’s assuredness cut through: the film was selected as Georgia’s entry for the 2021 Oscars, and director Luca Guadagnino signed on as producer for Kulumbegashvili’s latest film, April, about a doctor who performs abortions in a remote Georgian village for women who otherwise have no hope of accessing them. 

Beginning’s opening sequence feels tame by comparison to April’s early moments, where we witness a real birth which, minutes later, is depicted as a stillbirth. The hospital’s lead obstetrician Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili, who also starred in Beginning) is accused of malpractice by the baby’s father, but we sense it’s her reputation as a covert abortionist that is really on trial. Nina’s isolation festers, taking the form of an expressionistic creature who looks like a semi-human manifestation of Francis Bacon’s Fury (1944). 

Abortion is technically ‘legal’ in Georgia up to 12 weeks, but the conservative ruling party continues to introduce restrictions that cut off access for the most vulnerable. Abortion is rejected, as is pregnancy outside of marriage, and in Nina’s village – the same village where Kulumbegashvili grew up – locals need her skills as an abortionist, but simultaneously resent them. 

As Kulumbegashvili explained during our recent interview, she was careful to keep April’s subject matter under wraps during production, and did not seek state funding. While Beginning was put forward for the Oscars, April has yet to screen in Georgia. 

You spent a lot of time on a maternity ward observing births before you began shooting April. I want to ask about the real birth scene, which takes place early on in the film. How did you discuss and negotiate that scene with the mother, given that it’s followed by a depiction of a baby’s passing?

This film was a very humbling experience for me. I used to be a bit obsessed with the formal aspect of being a director, and my life is like ‘before’ and ‘after’. I was shown that stepping back sometimes is the most important thing that you can do as a director. First I wanted to talk to women mostly about abortions. And then gradually I started to understand that it’s all part of our experience. It’s fully human. The female body is just so beautiful and so fragile and so powerful at the same time, especially in the process of pregnancy. This [birth] scene was not part of the script originally. The woman who’s actually in the film, she’s very open. She really wanted to be part of the film and her husband was very supportive. But on the other hand, obviously, in Georgia, it’s being misinterpreted. We need to hide her personality and everything. I don’t even know how much I can say, still. 

You were pregnant while working on the film. What was that experience like for you? 

When I finished shooting, I learned that I was pregnant. I still cannot make sense of it, because being pregnant is difficult enough without watching a C-section in the editing room every day and making decisions. And I had a pretty difficult pregnancy. In my own C-section, I felt so close to my film somehow. And then when I went back to the studio, my child was three weeks old, and I decided to redo certain parts of the film, because I understood the importance of things, and I started to look at things a bit differently. And I was very emotional about looking at the newborns in the film. My child was there all the time in the studio.

I understand that while abortion is technically legal in Georgia there are many restrictions, and those intensified in 2023. How much of that change influenced your thinking on the film, and was it partly a reaction to that?

Every day the Georgian government changes legislation, and it’s worse and worse. Literally every day they do it. A few months ago, they were discussing if a single woman should be allowed to do IVF. A few days ago somebody very close to me had a miscarriage and they needed to give her an abortion pill. In the entire town where we made the film, there was not even one pill available, not in a clinic, not in the pharmacies. This young woman needed to go through a surgical procedure because that was the only way. Medically speaking, that was not the best choice, but there’s so many restrictions that doctors need to make decisions which are not in the best interest of the patient. But you can’t talk about it. When the film was screened in Venice, officials representing the Ministry of Culture showed up at the screening. They really needed to immediately distance themselves from the film. I think at the moment, it is better if they don’t screen the film in Georgia, because some problems might occur as a result, and I cannot do anything, sadly. 

What impact will April have on your ability to make films there in future? 

It’s not possible for me. This is one thing which I’m not shying away [from], and it’s possible for me to talk about because this film had zero state funding. We were obviously hiding what the film was about, and we did not apply anywhere, not even in European funds, because I was very scared that somebody would publish the synopsis. Honestly, I don’t exist as a director in Georgia.

In the film, you show a vaginal birth and C-section, but for an extended dramatised abortion scene the camera is mostly fixed on the patient’s torso. Why is that?

Because I think that abortion is about [the] body, fully. It doesn’t matter why somebody goes for an abortion, it’s still very violent towards our bodies. I wanted, somehow, to convey this feeling of pain. Then the birth, I just really wanted people to look at the moment of this particular child being born, because there is something very matter of fact about it. All of us came to the world this way, in one way or another, but then there is such a mystery about it. I wanted it to be part of the cinematic experience.

There’s a tendency when we talk about birth to frame women as heroic for going through it, which is true in some ways, but I often wonder if that does women a disservice. If we’re ‘superhuman’, that can also cause us to be treated as less than human – as if we’re able to cope with anything. What are your thoughts on this? 

While spending weeks and months at the maternity clinic I started to realise that the moment of childbirth was something very ordinary, perhaps the most ordinary process humans go through. I remember that the male actors put much more emphasis on the ‘miraculous’ aspect of it, and [women] had a more down to earth point of view. It was difficult for some of the male members of the crew and cast to accept this idea that was embodied in the film. They told me that when they witnessed their children being born, they witnessed a miracle. I believe that, on a personal level, those are the miraculous moments for the parents. Maybe we as humans need to believe that us and our children are special in some way. But in the larger and more global scope, those are the most ordinary moments. And maybe this is the most interesting idea for me, to see a miracle in the most ordinary moments of life. 

It’s so hard to describe, let alone depict, the kind of pain involved in gynaecological interventions, but you can really sense the physical pain experienced during the film’s abortion scene. How did you articulate to the actor what you needed to create it? 

All the real instruments were brought from the hospital. And then we had a doctor who was a huge help in the process. Nina [Ia] was training in how it’s actually done. It was incredible in a way, because we all trained. And then once we started to film it, it was a closed set. I wanted everybody out. Ia, the actress, was performing as if she was doing it and I stood next to her, giving her instruments. When I wrote the script, I wrote something like ‘a sacred ritual’, and it was like that when filming it. We knew that we could not do many takes, because it was actually physically very exhausting for both of the actresses. 

You gesture at the issue of consent in that situation in a very interesting way. You just hear this one remark of Nina saying, ‘isn’t it her right to be a mother’? And there is an ambiguity around whether this character, who has an intellectual disability, can consent to the abortion. 

There is no consent there. What happens in real life in these villages is that it’s not even about consent, it’s about the impossibility of being pregnant outside of marriage. My mother was 16 when she got pregnant with me, and she was 17 when I was born, and I had a really amazing father, but they did not consent to having me. It was just illegal to have an abortion. But I know that my mother was a luckier person because she comes from a family which really supported her in raising me and most of the families would not do that. Actually there is a lot of stigma about any kind of disability in Georgia, especially when it comes to women and their right to get married or to have children and to have partners. I think that this society, which is so oppressive towards women, it’s just a circle of oppression, and most of the people are victims of this way of life.

You spoke in a previous interview about a murder case you encountered while working within the hospital, which is partly woven into the fabric of the film. How did you manage to cope with that experience, and move forward together as a team to create the film? 

This was very difficult. It took some time to process what had happened. Sometimes life imitates cinema but what we have realised while working on April is that life, in its extreme manifestations, is so difficult to process and even more difficult to convey through cinema. 

You have a close working relationship with your cinematographer, Arseni Khachaturan. But what was it like having a male cinematographer in the maternity unit, how was that received? And how did he feel about it? 

We were preparing for almost three years, so he took some time to make a decision, if he would want to come and see how birth happens. We decided to create a construction where the cinematographer would sit behind the curtain with the focus puller and assistant, because we did not want this woman to feel any extra presence. Anyone actually, men or women. So we just kept everybody out. I don’t think that Arseni would [have been] able to, if he felt that his presence would be invasive. He was there, but also he was not at the same time.

What really struck me about Ia as Nina is that way she plays emptiness, and is able to take so much away. What is that like for you as a director, to create everything around her?

It is a challenge, but it’s also a perfect collaboration. She is challenging for any other actor in a scene, because she doesn’t like to talk about a scene at all. She loves to rehearse, but she doesn’t want to talk much about motivation, feelings – not at all actually. What’s important for her is my presence, because I’m always trying to be close to her. We understand that we’re building a character, and it’s actually ‘building’ which is happening. She can bring so many versions of the character. She was five years old when she became an actress, she has been an actress all her life. I didn’t know what being an actress meant, until I met Ia.

How would you say your relationship has changed, from Beginning to April? 

It’s always very layered and complex. I know her entire family, I know her children, we’re pretty close. We’re almost related now. But on the other hand, when you start to work with her, she stops communication. She’s very obsessive in a way, and so am I. How do you write emptiness? Intuitively, she leads you, somehow.

Were there any particular references for the ‘creature’ that appears in the film?

It’s a creature, yes. You’re the first person who called it a creature. Obviously I have many inspirations, mostly in sculpture. I love Francis Bacon. I don’t usually talk about reference. It was mostly my feeling I wanted to bring on screen, this feeling of impossibility, to be stuck in human experience but also to desperately want to get out of it. But then it’s all theoretical, and I don’t want to talk about these [factors] that much, I just wanted to somehow grasp this condition, and I hope that we did it. 

Did you have any resistance from the community when you were making the film? And in that sense, did you feel that Nina’s experience reflected your own in any way?

I never wanted to make a film about a director or an artist, but I really wanted to make a film about somebody who believes in the meaning of what she’s doing and she just wants to serve her profession. And when I was at the clinic, I started to understand that these are the most empathetic people I’ve ever met in my life, these doctors. But they can’t really stand there while there is a problem in the maternity world and be emotional about it, because they need to be very rational and very cold at the same time. In the 1990s, when there was a civil war in Georgia, we never had electricity. All the C-sections and surgeries – how did these people do it without electricity? When I asked this doctor, he said that they had lamps which they could wear on their heads. Imagine doing a surgery in those conditions? They worked with the tiniest salary. What makes them do what they do, if it’s not endless empathy? 

► April is in UK cinemas now.