“All of Us, Together” | Dea Kulumbegashvili, April
Winner of the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival, writer-director Dea Kulumbegashvili’s second feature April is a disquieting drama that ranks highly among the year’s most formally bold, emotionally riveting character studies.
Set in the Georgian countryside, the film centers on Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili), an expert obstetrician whose efforts to aid women seeking abortions—despite legal prohibition—fall under suspicion when a newborn baby dies after an otherwise routine delivery.
For Kulumbegashvili’s follow-up to Beginning (2020), her acclaimed feature debut, the filmmaker returned to the region where she was born and spent months observing doctors in a maternity clinic, as well as the lives of those in the surrounding rural communities. Heightened by its haunting, sometimes spectral cinematography, by Arseni Khachaturan (Bones and All), and a brooding, minimalist soundscape, by experimental composer Matthew Herbert, April screens Tuesday, May 6, at 4:30 p.m., at the Music Box Theatre, as part of the Chicago Critics Film Festival.
Ahead of the screening, Kulumbegashvili graciously took the time to answer this year’s CCFF filmmaker questionnaire. Below, our conversation, which has been edited and condensed.
How did you first become interested in filmmaking? What was your path toward directing your first film?
When I was growing up, it was a civil war in Georgia, and we never had electricity. I was growing up in a rural area, [in the village of Lagodekhi]—where I now make films, actually—and I had not seen films at that age. I would just watch films in bits and pieces, when for a short time we would have electricity—maybe for an hour a day, or something like that, I would see random parts of random films.
I started to become so mesmerized by cinema. It was a window into this whole other world, but also there was something very familiar about it, and I could relate emotionally. It would allow me to imagine other places or other people, to get to know other people as well. That was my introduction to cinema, I guess. But, honestly, until I was 17, I had not seen any film from beginning to end, because there was no electricity. I was always an aspiring writer, for a long time. Gradually, I came to cinema, but through writing.
At what point did the language you were finding to express yourself become cinematic?
I think it was always a cinematic language. I just did not know what a cinematic language was. I was just a very bad novelist, in a way. [laughs] It was really funny how I started to write a novel when I was 17; in a way, I always go back to it as my major source of inspiration, because it was a compilation of everything I had seen and experienced until that point in my life.
I had really incredible friends who were writers, who were much older than me, and they would read it, and they would be fascinated by what I was writing, but really not understand how I was writing or what it was supposed to be. There was a lot of encouragement to publish it, but as short stories, because everybody was trying to make sense of it, to try to figure out what it would be. In parts, it was too impressionistic; in parts, it was too much about feelings. I knew I would detour away from the main plot, and it was too messy, somehow, for a novel.
Then again, maybe it was always meant to be something else, and it was never really a novel. I was, in a way, also trying to write for other directors, and I was not succeeding in that, because I was very possessive. I started to think that my scripts only make sense for my own films, and so then I was encouraged to try and make a film on my own.
What inspired you to make the film you're bringing to the festival?
I am from this place where April was made. I also made my first feature, which is called Beginning, there, and I also made my short film there. Even though I already, at that point, lived in the United States, I would always go back to visit my family, and then to also make films.
I spent a lot of time in the villages, with all these women who somehow brought this film to me, because they were actually initiators of the conversation. They came to me to talk, because they were invited to spend as much time as they would want on my set. They were there with their kids, because the kids were acting in Beginning, but I also wanted these women to have something else but their daily life.
In a way, when they would come to set, I would see that it was a day off from their usual daily routine, and they would start to imagine that something else was possible. I could not see, but I knew, the hardships of their lives. We would talk, and we would gradually become pretty close, and they would bring secrets to me to share. I started to understand that this was my next film.
Tell us about a film that you consider a guiding influence (whether it has informed your overarching vision as a filmmaker, directly informed the title you're bringing to the festival, or both).
I was always a cinephile, even when I was only able to watch glimpses of films, because it was always this world of impossible connections and emotions. You could really see that you’re not alone, that with everything that you feel there is somebody else, somewhere. Cinema, for me, is very personal but also a very universal experience.
When I was really able to start to watch films, in our family, we would watch neorealist films, for example the films of Vittorio De Sica. I remember watching The Bicycle Thieves and all of us crying together. I really admire that film for this possibility of a connection, to see the world through little details. In the film, it’s not just the grand story and the through-line; when they go to sell their bedsheets, and you see how many of the bedsheets are inside the room where they hand them in, you understand the scope of the tragedy of Italy after the war.
There was something I could really relate to in that, because I was living in Georgia; those things made it possible for me to understand that cinema offers a connection in time, to understand that our human experiences do not need to happen in the here and now only for us to understand each other and to empathize. One of the more most important questions for me in cinema is, how much do we really need to know about each other's cultures—and about specifically each other's backgrounds and all their details—in order to empathize? Because I was able to emphasize with people who lived much earlier than I’m living.
I obviously love Robert Bresson and Chantal Akerman. I love Truffaut. I love cinema in general, I would say. I am very much inspired and easily influenced. It’s part of a dialogue, for me, in a way, because I cannot see myself standing aside from cinema as such which already exists and even that which is contemporary.
Tell us about a location that's held significance to the film you're bringing to the festival: a setting where filming took place, a geographic area that provided a source of inspiration, or another type of space that comes to mind for you in thinking about the film. What made this place so special?
I spent a lot of time in this hospital because, when I was a child, I had problematic asthma, and I used to be brought to this hospital. Sometimes, for months, I needed to stay there in another part of the hospital. I grew up with my grandparents, mostly, and I used to go there with them. In a way, this place has been part of my life from the very beginning of it.
I used to go back with my sister when my grandfather used to spend a lot of time there, because of his health condition, and we would stay with him there overnight to try to help him. We used to play in the hallways, do our homework, hang out with nurses. We would see into different rooms, through the doors, and see different patients.
It was this strange feeling, which I was not able to explain as a child. It was this feeling of mystery and something unknown, of something very dreadful and really scary, but we also really wanted to hope; we loved our grandfather, and we always wanted to believe that, anytime we would go there, we would also be coming back home, all of us together. Once, I remember that my grandmother needed to stay with him; she would stay with him a lot, but once she needed to stay with him alone, and I saw her crying. She did not want them to be there, because it was this lonely, dreadful place.
There was a huge forest neighboring the hospital,, so you could hear the sounds of the forest in the stormy night. You could hear animals. It was a very mysterious place; in a way, it was a transitional place, and not only from non-being to being—because, of course, the children are born there—but also from life to something else, because we would see people crying all the time. It was inevitable that I would need to go back there to make a film.
There was a suspended sense of time, a sense of time that only exists within the hospital itself. You almost never see clearly through the windows; the world outside of the windows becomes not as real as what’s inside those sterile hallways.
The theatrical experience brings us together to celebrate artistic experience and expand our horizons as human beings. Tell us about a memorable theatrical experience from your life.
My first theatrical experience… Actually, I was maybe five years old, and it was right before Georgia went into ruins, so we still had cinemas. My grandmother would repeatedly go to watch films; she loved cinemas, but nobody in the family wanted to go with her, because she loved romantic melodramas, and nobody wanted to watch those with her.
She used to take me to watch, but I was five years old. And I remember that I didn't want to go, but then she would tell me that, if I could take any hat—because I had some hats as a child; I loved hats—she would fill my hat with candy. I would annoy everybody around me in cinemas, because I would be sitting there, eating candy, but and then she would be next to me, crying, being deeply emotional about films.
I remember we used to watch films from Egypt. I remember this film, The White Dress. I would see all the beauty of it, and people falling in love, but I could not fully understand. I just loved sitting in this dark room, with people—mostly women—crying around me, and me just eating candies. [laughs] But I also used to cry with them, at the same time. I think this experience of sharing this very emotional moment, and also being able to have my own experience at the same time. Eating candy was, in a way, truly just my own experience, right? It’s what I love about cinema. Everybody is sharing something, obviously, and we have something we all relate to in the film, in the same way, but we all have our own experiences in the cinema as well. I love cinemas. There’s an anonymity that you preserve while you’re in the cinema, but, at the same time, you truly connect with others. It’s something which I have never experienced anywhere else. When you go to Philharmonic concerts, it’s still a very individualistic experience. But cinema is, somehow, also a collective experience.
I always say that, also as a director, I love this dark room where there are people illuminated partially with the light that’s coming from the screen. There’s a mysterious connection which starts to exist, and it goes beyond the power of a director. Honestly, it’s not you who established this, but it's something which film is despite you, beyond you. It’s not in your control, really.