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…

Beautiful to look at, brutally paced. Conceptually, April is a brilliant film (the crippling loneliness of a taboo, and therefore thankless, job; the undiscussed ethical grey areas of abortion and bodily autonomy. etc.). But it sacrifices much of these great ideas in pursuit of visual immersion - which ironically pulls the viewer right out of the film (several people walked out of my already sparsely populated screening). I would love to have learned more about our protagonist Nina and her clandestine, Haneke-esque sex life, or more about the rising aggression of men in the village as they persecute Nina for her perceived moral violations against their wives and daughters. But every frame is about three full minutes too long, so…

“French cinema is starting to ‘blob’ immigration,” wrote Serge Daney, “to ‘naturalize’ it, to make it a theme like any other.” It’s of course not Kulumbegashvili’s fault that this film won’t be shown in Georgia, and that’s part of her point, but there is something disheartening about an international film culture that means a director goes abroad to equip themselves with an American MFA, returns armed with the slender means of the twenty-first century serious festival film — academy ratio, static camera, long takes, refusal of découpage, artfully off-kilter framing, “supernatural” element amid low-key naturalism — to make a film about the awful state of things at home, and then takes it to Venice with Luca Guadagnino’s support (the hag…

Fuck

An entirely unpleasant and stressful viewing; a surrealist prologue is the only introduction you get before you’re violently thrown into the world of these characters. And fuck is it ever a cruel one, overflowing with 10-15 minute takes that (quite often) feature characters staring directly into the camera lens, further unravelling any mental protection you could’ve walked into this movie with. It’s almost as if at any moment, one of them would say: “you’re seeing this, right? Please tell me you’re seeing this”—- I’ve never spent so much time in an auditorium desperately trying to escape the eye-sight of the characters.

An effortlessly courageous work that will, very sadly, probably never see proper distribution because of just how brave…

April is bleak and difficult. It's one of the most uncomfortable experiences I've had in a cinema, filled with numbing scenes of pain that the film lingers on. It features both a stillbirth and an abortion, shown unflinchingly. Yet April is more than just these moments. It is about a tough week, of a woman doing important work over a few days as things seem to unravel. The point seems to be that these unfortunate realities exist and someone has to be there for them. The story is specifically about female suffering, of abuse and the physical consequences of childbearing. Our lead is left adrift and alone in her work and life, with the camerawork distancing her by placing her…

O aborto ilegal vai continuar acontecendo, quer você queira ou não, e, num mundo que condena mais do que aceita uma alternativa diferente, existem essas pessoas que ainda resistem nas sombras, Nina, mesmo trabalhando com partos, também esconde seu outro lado ilegal para continuar ajudando mulheres que desejam fazer um aborto, como nessa pequena cidade rural na Geórgia, tudo precisa ser ainda mais escondido, sua situação se transforma em um segredo bastante íntimo, porém, as coisas se tornam críticas depois de um certo incidente causa a raiva de um homem que sabe dos seus segredos. Por trás do surrealismo aterrorizante em April, acompanhamos um realismo ainda mais brutal, como se a obra estivesse passando por um tipo de metamorfose e…