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“The Distributors Point the Finger at the Streamers”: Dea Kulumbegashvili on April
Ia Sukhitashvili in April Dea Kulumbegashvili’s entrancing second feature grew partly out of preparations for her first, Beginning, when she cast children in Georgia and met mothers who married quite young and had large families. In April, Ia Sukhitashvili (the lead in Beginning) plays Nina, a leading obstetrician at a maternity clinic in eastern Georgia who delivers babies at the hospital and also secretly travels to houses in the countryside to perform abortions. But while there are social and legal complications to providing these services, as envisioned by Kulumbegashvili Nina’s story transcends conventional drama to be a sometimes hyperreal, sometimes enigmatic journey through darkness to a personal reckoning, body and soul.
Already one of contemporary cinema’s leading lights, Kulumbegashvili works closely again with her longtime cinematographer, Arseni Khachaturan (soon to shoot Robert Pattinson and Zendaya in Kristoffer Borgli’s The Drama). “We kind of grew up together,” she says of their friendly collaboration. The director cast actors from both Georgian theater and film as well as nonprofessionals, bringing a familiarity with the area from growing up in a village there without electricity during the civil war. After a four- to five-month edit and a summer of postproduction in Babelsberg, including tapping composer Matthew Herbert for the minimalist score, Kulumbegashvili premiered her film in Venice and won the Special Jury Prize.
I talked with Kulumbegashvili about April in a bright hotel ballroom in Venice before the film’s official screenings (at one point with the adorable distraction of her child, born after shooting, peeping through a glass door behind me). After playing at TIFF, the film makes its US premiere at NYFF next week.
Filmmaker: Your film opens with an incredible set of four or five shots, each of which is so different and original. Could you talk about this sequence and how it puts us into a fresh frame of reference with every moment?
Kulumbegashvili: I like to get into the film immediately, because for me it’s important that film is an immersive experience and each scene is something else. For example, the rain in the lake—it’s such a physical experience for her, almost like a dream. The entire film literally starts as her point of view, and that was very important, to make it immediately a very tactile and physical experience without even seeing her. Then there is the birth. I saw many births before I got to the point when I was allowed to film it and do it myself. The first time I saw it, I knew where I would want the camera to be, and it did define a lot about the film, because this was the most important point to start to visualize the rest. The dialogue scene [in this opening sequence]—those are my favorite in a way, because I really love to work with actors. I always know that I need to find a frame and right away create the power dynamic, who sits where, then they will just do it and I’m not really necessary. Once you position the actors and give them limitations, good actors know what to do and then you just work with them on nuances.
Filmmaker: The staging is always so carefully arrayed. How did you block out that early meeting in the hospital office, with Nina and the others?
Kulumbegashvili: For me it’s really important to understand the geography of the place and to draw it. I draw a lot, usually plans for the shots: where is the table, where is the desk, how would they sit, who would sit? Then I do a lot of combinations and think about it. I knew that I wanted to look at Nina from her back, but then this is almost the first time we really see her and she’s the main character. So how do you pull it off to have such a dramaturgically important scene and have the camera behind her? I also like to introduce all the characters, because you need to introduce conflict to create stakes. If you think about it in technical terms, there are so many things you need to do in this scene that it’s very exciting for me. That’s where I’m totally a film student.
Filmmaker: Thinking through the grammar of the situation.
Kulumbegashvili: Oh, my God, I love it! Like, let’s look at this, at this… Another thing is that with Arseni [Khachaturan], the cinematographer, we sometimes create little furniture with the cardboard and move things around. We have a big cardboard [model] and position the rooms, because we built that part of the hospital. I love doing that, and I hope I can always do this. And I always find the location which is the main location in the film and build everything around it that I can for comfort. Because certain things, dialogue and dramaturgical scenes, I was obviously unable to shoot in the real hospital. So, behind the real hospital is this abandoned building, which we asked the municipality to give us for some time, and we rebuilt it into the set, which looks exactly the way the real hospital looks. I could work with more freedom in terms of how wide the rooms need to be, how big. It’s very technical, but a lot of directing is technical.
Filmmaker: When did you start using these miniature models?
Kulumbegashvili: Long ago. When I was making a short film and Arseni was shooting it, we already had little toy dinosaurs, because we did not have humans, and sticking them to the board. Because I am a very visual person, it’s very important to see things, and it’s fascinating to work with mise en scene. I really need to understand exactly everything that happens, and I want to be on the same page with Arseni. It’s very important for me that he feels comfortable with what we’re doing, so we need to really go through everything together all the time.
Filmmaker: And no pre-vis software?
Kulumbegashvili: You know, once we did that. I don’t like software that much, honestly. Arseni sometimes does his storyboard drawings like that. I’d rather have them printed out.
Filmmaker: Nina works in this specific milieu, and I was curious what research or interviews with doctors you did in getting all the detail.
Kulumbegashvili: I started to work on the film in 2021 and spent a year in many clinics, even in the morgue. It was very extensive research in terms of understanding what would be the cause of death [and] the investigative process, how would it be done. [As the film begins, Nina is under investigation for the death of an infant she helped deliver.] The place where they do an autopsy, we built it. All the texts were written by professionals: I was working with doctors and writing with them, and also with women who came forward to talk to me about their own stories and very tragic things that happened. The death of the woman [which] is also portrayed in the film is not exactly but partially how it happened, and I was in this hospital at that moment. It was emotionally a very difficult process, and it required a lot of learning and a lot of collaboration. All of these doctors were very generous.
Filmmaker: You mentioned the hospital birth scene earlier, which is so strikingly shot from overhead, as being important to defining the film.
Kulumbegashvili: I wanted to focus on birth, and that’s how you focus on birth. I didn’t want to see the faces, I didn’t want to see acting or trying to perform. I just wanted it to be about a birth. Also, there is something very like a fresco for me when you look frontally at a moment in life. It was not an aim or a mission for me to film this. It started to become evident we would do it when we spent a lot of time in the clinic, and women wanted it also. It was also a difficult process in that you need to find a way to do it and not be in anybody’s way in the delivery room.
Filmmaker: How did you work with Ia Sukhitashvili on telling this particular story?
Kulumbegashvili: I think she’s a great actress, and when we made Beginning, I knew that there were so many aspects to what she could offer as an actress that I was not exploring, because in one film you just can’t do everything. I really wanted this script to be written for her. So initially, when I got an idea of this character, the first person I called was her, and I asked her to come to the hospital because I was already there. She started to come almost every week and spend time there. We would talk a lot, and she would attend deliveries and spend a lot of time learning with doctors. A lot of the character was me observing her starting to embody the character. So, in a way, it was created by us together. It’s not like I wrote [the part] and gave it her. We were just there, and I could ask, “What do you feel in that moment? What do you think about that?” It was a lot of intuitive guidance of each other. I was not only guiding her; she was also really guiding me.
Filmmaker: And it’s a hard character to be.
Kulumbegashvili: Yeah, for her it was extremely demanding, physically and emotionally.
Filmmaker: There’s such detail to the performance. Another aspect was the vocal acting, the breathing we hear, on or off screen.
Kulumbegashvili: We record every single breath because it’s very important. I think breathing is part of dramaturgy. I’m really grateful to my actors because they can tolerate these things. I do ADR my film fully, usually, and I did the same for Beginning. After we finish editing, we start to record breathing. I’m very grateful to this great dialogue editor I met in Germany, Lajos [Wienkamp-Marques].
Filmmaker: Speaking of atmosphere, the low-light photography in this movie is incredible. Could you talk about achieving that with your cinematographer, Arseni Khachaturan?
Kulumbegashvili: Oh my god, thank you for seeing that, because at the moment apparently it’s a huge problem in the world of cinema to shoot something with low light. It’s a problem for streamers. I was like, “We have huge screens at home. Why would you want to watch something on your laptop?” For me it’s very important to be faithful to the light, because, I’m sorry, I hate when in many Hollywood films, you see a person driving, and there is this frontal light on the face coming from I don’t know where! It’s so distracting, I can’t watch. I start to think, can somebody just remove it?
Filmmaker: It’s like it’s coming from God.
Kulumbegashvili: Yes, and those kind of things are not acceptable. Arseni sometimes makes fun of me. He says, “You just complicate my life.” But obviously, he loves it at the same time, because it’s very doable. When people tell you that it’s too dark, it’s not true, actually, because film stock is very sensitive and you can do so much. You just need to trust the camera. And I’m not the first person who’s doing it—you just need to watch some films, it’s not that difficult. But it’s usually a huge discussion. Arseni is sometimes pissed about that, because sometimes we get in trouble [when we get questions] like, “Why is this scene so dark?” For me, it’s extremely important to know what the source of light is. If there is no lamp or something, I would rather have a totally pitch-black screen and just sound than to see something where I don’t know how it’s illuminated.
Filmmaker: Are there particular movies you like for how dark they are?
Kulumbegashvili: Many, actually! I think people took more risks before. Now it’s less and less, and everybody kind of points at each other; the distributors point the finger at the streamers. I just feel that maybe they’re too scared. You need to trust the audience. But I don’t know, these people obviously know their job and know what they’re doing and have more experience, and maybe the situation was really bad and I’m just unaware.
Filmmaker: But there’s no substitute for the mood that you create, like when Nina goes driving and picks up that guy. It’s like you’re there in the car with them.
Kulumbegashvili: Yes! It’s very important, because for me otherwise acting is impossible, like I don’t understand who she’s acting for.
Filmmaker: What kind of camera did you use?
Kulumbegashvili: We shot on 35mm, and most of the film is shot on [an] 18mm lens. In two places, we used another lens because of how I wanted to narrow down the point of view in the abortion scene, but most of the film is just one lens. I do that all the time; I did that with my previous film. I really like to create limitations. Otherwise I’m too curious and start to become distracted. I want to do everything and that’s a recipe for a disaster.
Filmmaker: Sometimes the limitations can come from outside, too, like the storm sequence around the farmhouse. How do you stage that? It’s an actual storm, right?
Kulumbegashvili: Yeah, it’s an actual storm. Everything’s actual. We spent a lot of time in this area, driving through that field maybe hundreds of times, and I also spent a lot of time there alone. I knew what to expect when. I know that maybe the way I work looks a bit unconventional the way I work, and sometimes it requires a lot of trust from producers. For example, usually the AD would plan things totally differently, but for me it’s really important that the AD listens to me and understands what I already know about this place, what we should expect and what I think would be easier for the team. Because they’re huge fields, hundreds of hectares. It’s not [a] very easy infrastructure.
Filmmaker: I’m betting the team got stuck in the mud once or twice.
Kulumbegashvili: Of course, all the time, so I require the AD to really work with me and help me. We knew when the storm would be, but we always had two plans every day. Because of that, I always have all the locations ready, and we mostly shoot in sequence. There are certain things we define as priorities.
Filmmaker: How did you choose this part of the country?
Kulumbegashvili: It’s an actual field which you need to pass through when you go from the town to the villages and back. It’s a bit technical understanding this landscape. So I would [plan]: here will be the camera with the longest crane available in Georgia. I knew the trajectory of the camera, when does it go up and down and all of it. We also create [the] landscape there. There were natural flowers, and we plowed the rest of the field and left part of it just green. Then, on the day of the shoot, [there] was a real storm, and for Arseni, it would not be possible to sit on this crane, so I was operating. Sometimes Arseni allows me. Because he really loves to operate the camera, and he gets, like, super-sad [when he doesn’t].
Filmmaker: Could you talk about the creature or vision in the film, which I guess is a mix of camera and CGI?
Kulumbegashvili: It’s a costume to start with. It’s all shot. What’s done in CGI is just deleting certain parts.
Filmmaker: What was your visual concept?
Kulumbegashvili: Literally this: it’s like something which is not yet and not anymore. I was thinking about this phrase by Hannah Arendt. It’s between past and future, aa transitional moment for this creature from human to non-human, from being to non-being, or another form of being in-between the worlds. I know that it has nothing to do with Hannah Arendt directly, but for me usually everything’s connected somehow. And I knew that I didn’t want her to have eyes, ears, or mouth, but I wanted her to be expressing her emotions .
So it was difficult, because actors are used to different forms of expression. We first tried to do it with an actress in a costume, and it was not possible. We did so much physical training, because creating the creature started with physicality—how it would walk, sit, everything. Then I found this incredible performer from England, Hannah [Sheperd], and we just did it with her. She’s a dancer. I was by the camera and would say “very slow” or “slide your foot,” and it was easier in a way to do it with her because she’s a dancer.
Filmmaker: I think you said earlier that people have responded quite differently to this film in terms of differences between men and women.
Kulumbegashvili: Yeah, even today with your [journalist] colleagues. Several men said that it was very difficult for them to look at the delivery scene. And I was like, “Really?” You want to look away—I understand, and you can look away. But I would not want to look away because, I mean, we were born in this way. There is nothing that new at the end. Nina’s sexuality is also perceived differently, and her sense of loneliness. For some men, it’s a question: Why is she so lonely? How should we understand this? And for me, I don’t know if there is one specific, very clear, pragmatic, practical answer to why somebody could be lonely. She has many reasons, but I can’t answer that very simply.
Filmmaker: To me it also felt like a choice about the movie, that we’re joining her at an advanced stage in whatever she’s going through.
Kulumbegashvili: Yes! Exactly. Because something already has happened and it’s done.
Filmmaker: The scene where she’s going to explain everything is not—
Kulumbegashvili: It’s not going to be in the film.
Filmmaker: What was the process of writing the screenplay and how much time did it take?
Kulumbegashvili: Writing for me is very quick, usually. What really takes a lot of time for me is to understand what I’m writing. I can literally write in two weeks, but I can be researching for a year because I really need to have the entire film very structurally correct already in my head, then I will sit down and write it. I don’t do rewrites or revisions that much.
Filmmaker: There’s a clean force to the dialogue, and then a poetic line like “I miss you like I miss my childhood” or something that will capture a whole experience.
Kulumbegashvili: Yeah, it’s like a backstory. Everything is in that line. Writing is listening at the same time, right? You just hear people.
