Ryan McNeilThroughout the course of Dea Kulumbegashvili’s latest film, the audience is hyper-aware of the sound of the film as much as the look. Specifically, one cannot escape the sounds of breath and water – two essential elements for life itself.
It’s as if the film never wants us to forget that it is a film about life – the life of the those we encounter on our journey, the life they hope to shape for themselves, the life they are entitled to build.
APRIL is about Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili) – an OB-GYN in Georgia who also performs illegal abortions for citizens of the villages that surround her central hospital. As the film begins, she finds herself under investigation for malpractice during a delivery. While the facts come to light, Nina continues care for women of her community – documented and undocumented.
Her story is bold, unflinching, and heart-wrenching.
APRIL is a movie that knows how badly we want to look at something else, and how much we’d rather talk about something else; It doesn’t let us.
It keeps us at the side of the bed, or the foot of the table. It makes us wait down the hall, or sit in the office. Sometimes it shows us everything, and sometimes it blocks our view and forces us to listen instead. The result is incredible – giving us filmmaking that is startling, stunning, frank, and very very affecting.
APRIL knows the sorts of conversations the world is having about a woman’s right to choose and it will not yield the floor until we have listened to what it – what women – have to say on the matter.
While the film has several incredibly intense moments – the sorts of scenes one doesn’t normally see in in a motion picture – it is just as much about the moments in-between. The film offers gentle bedside manner by letting us listen to the river running, or watching the poppies blow. It knows how hard this story is, but also how much harder it is for the real-life women whose tales are invoked.
APRIL is not for the faint of heart…but then, neither is life itself. That is what’s at the core of Kulumbegashvili’s seminal work; a hope that we all can take a moment – take a breath – and consider the true challenge, fate, and horror facing the women of the world as they dare to choose which path they want to follow…
…assuming they are lucky enough to have a choice.