Description
Nina is an obstetrician at a maternity hospital in Eastern Georgia. After a difficult delivery, an infant dies and the father demands an inquiry into her methods. The scrutiny threatens to expose Nina’s secret side job—visiting village homes of pregnant girls and women to provide unsanctioned abortions.
Dea Kulumbegashvili’s APRIL—an uncompromising, singular examination of the ways women’s rights and bodies are controlled and imperiled by patriarchy and cultural oppression—premiered at the 2024 Venice Film Festival, where it won the Special Jury Prize.
Aided by cinematographer Arseni Khachaturan (and incorporating actual scenes of childbirth), Kulumbegashvili deploys transcendently beautiful, frequently unsettling visual compositions to confront grim truths head-on in ways both surrealistically poetic and heartbreakingly matter-of-fact.
Straddling worlds and identities, Nina provokes a simmering tension as an outsider in the most modern and traditional of spaces. Actor Ia Sukhitashvili maintains her character’s haunted dignity with a performance that vividly manifests the personal cost of her choices. APRIL is a violent whisper of a film, forcing us to acknowledge the parallel truths between Nina’s world and our own.
—Heidi Zwicker, Sundance Film Festival guide