One of the great honors I had at this year’s Sundance Film Festival was the time I got to spend with Georgian filmmaker Dea Kulumbegashvili. We spoke about the genius of her second feature, “April,” which premiered in the Spotlight section at Sundance 2025, and her experience of making the picture while being pregnant and giving birth during the production.
Her debut feature, “Beginning,”was part of the Official Selection at the 2020 Cannes Film Festival as well as the San Sebastian Film Festival’s main competition, where it earned a historic win, taking home four awards for Best Film, Best Director, Best Screenplay and Best Actress for its star, Ia Sukhitashvili. It also won the FIPRESCI Award at the 2020 Toronto International Film Festival, and was part of the main slate at the New York Film Festival and the Busan International Film Festival. “Beginning”was selected to represent Georgia for the International Feature Film Oscar run in 2021.
During my chat with Dea last month, we spoke about “April,” which premiered in Competition at the 81st Venice International Film Festival, where it won the Special Jury Prize. The film is about a skilled obstetrician, Nina, who 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 feature employs a mesmerizing visual and sonic language to create an immersive experience about the resilience of the human will. (Synopsis from “April” press notes)
What inspired the making of this film?
My cinematographer always makes fun of me. He’d say that you can never take this particular woman outside of her village. Because no matter where I would go, like when I went to study film in New York, I would still go back to my village. It was not easy for me to separate myself from this place. Though I left my village many years ago, I went back and started to meet all the people whom I knew growing up in school. At that time when I met with them, they all were married and had their own children. When I would talk to them about their lives, I started to see what their day to day existence consisted of.
For my first feature, “Beginning,” I had a great casting director who went to every single school in the entire region. When she visited these schools, she invited all the children to come to the casting. We don’t want to be imposing our requirements onto children. We’d rather have them come to us and talk about their lives and what they want to do with them. These children were the biggest inspiration for the characters in “Beginning.” When they came to the audition, they would bring their mothers, which enabled me to get to know these women from the entire region. Many of them are in “April” because they came back to be a part of this film.
Making films in Georgia was a wonderful experience for me, because it was about this community, and at the same time, allowed me to build a community. I think it’s great when you can build communities through your art. During this process, I started to see how much violence these women endured in their personal lives. There is a lot of stigma around this. They can’t just talk and start to complain about their husbands being violent. One day, I went to talk to one woman because her two children were supposed to be in my film, but then things changed. This woman always wore things which would cover her neck, but I could see underneath her sweater that she had this huge scar on her neck. It was horrifying for me to see that because I also knew her husband. Then I started to feel horrible for these children, because so many things started to make sense regarding their behavior. They were two boys who probably felt miserable because they were unable to protect their mother. The things they saw were probably horrible. It was through these experiences that I saw within this community that the film came all together.
I wanted to talk about a particular scene that fascinated me. When Nina is sleeping with the man she used to be with on the couch, you can see the nature beneath them. The scene is so dreamy. Can you talk about how that scene came together?
Yes, I would structure a shooting day so that I would be there when the first person arrives on set. If the driver is going to be there, so am I. Many things happen on a set, and I want to be there so I can see how it all comes together. I enjoy how it makes my brain work. So one day, when they were unloading the equipment, I was walking around outside. There was this spectacular landscape which started to become visible as the sun was peering over the horizon. I usually take pictures of nature with my iPhone in moments like that. Days later, when we finished shooting, I was talking to the production designer about how much I could blow up that image from my iPhone. I found out that with the cinematographer, they could blow up the image about 18 meters long. So we printed it, and then I created this floor which was made of plastic, while planting these artificial trees beneath it. Cinema is reality merged with a dream. You go back and forth, and it’s amazing how we are able to do that. I always just keep those technical options open for myself.
I’d love to talk about the sound. How did you make us feel in the theater that we were in a storm?
Well, it’s a real storm. I guess one great thing about me making films in Georgia is that I could film the weather. I suppose that in the United States, because of all of the restrictions on how productions are structured, it would not be possible for me to film that. But in Georgia, we could do it as long as it was safe for everyone when filming it. We were very lucky to actually capture it in that way. And we knew that there would be a storm when it was coming, because we spent so many years there and so much time in this field where the storm scene took place. For the sound of the storm, we didn’t record it just on the day that we filmed it. We recorded many different storms and different winds over the course of many days, and then we just put together those pieces to create the experience for the film.
Can you talk about working with your producer, Alexandra Rossi, who was with you onstage for the Q&A following the screening?
It was just necessary at some point to bring her on to the project because I was pregnant. It’s not always possible to talk to men about your day to day existence as a pregnant woman. I’m not trying to be judgemental when I say that, but my pregnancy was very difficult. Everyone was scared about how to move forward with me being pregnant, but the male producers were more scared. They would say things like, “We need to stop the process. You first go and have the child and then you come back.” But I didn’t want to go.
Something I appreciated in this film was how you explore different aspects of women’s health with the child birth scenes and the abortion. You have us just sit there and watch. These experiences you portrayed brought me back to my own, as I went through the IVF process, and I appreciate how you immersed us in them, and in doing so, making us more comfortable with them. What do you hope people see in your film?
I talked to my friend recently, who spoke with me about her abortion, how painful it was, and the endless hours she spent waiting to go through the procedure before subsequently enduring this pain. She was talking to me about it in detail, and at that point, I realized that we don’t see this experience on film. Nobody talks about it. It’s important for me to bring those female experiences to the screen. We do talk about bringing more women into cinema, but then there is a demand to still make those old stories that we always see of women in cinema. These old stories are acceptable to most people, but we need to see more experiences.
And for me, I want to make films about the female experience. I remember that when I was making my first feature, I had a scene with a woman who was washing dishes, and this guy said, “You don’t need that scene. Why do you want to have her washing things in a film?” I asked him what he meant, but he didn’t know what the point was of watching this in a scene. People aren’t even comfortable with seeing a woman washing dishes on screen.
Something else we don’t talk about is being a female filmmaker and being a new mother. What do you do with your child when you’re making a film, even in terms of breastfeeding? I’m so grateful to my editor. When my child was around three weeks old, I went back into the editing room and I needed to breastfeed at least nine times during the day, so I always had the baby with me. We would edit and he would wear headphones so the sound wouldn’t disrupt the baby.. There are these specific nuances that make it very difficult when making a film with such a young child. Nobody talks about it, because it’s almost expected that you should disappear after you’ve had a child. Women are basically told to go somewhere else and come back when their child is sixteen.
It’s ridiculous. There’s so much that needs to change when it comes to that. Was the main character of Nina inspired by anyone?
She was based on real doctors I had met, not just one. I guess one of the biggest problems for the film is that it is banned from screening in Georgia. There’s a lot of controversy about me making this film, with some people claiming that it is a lie. The government knows I cannot talk about who Nina is based on, so they say I made up these stories in order to sensationalize things for the international audiences, and things like that. But thankfully, it is not a lie and there are real women who do these things that are necessary for the women in those villages.
