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April
(Dea Kulumbegashvili, 2024, France/Georgia/Italy, 134 minutes)
Georgian director Dea Kulumbegashvili won much acclaim for her 2020 debut feature Beginning, which featured in our post-lockdown reopening program “The Best of What You Missed” in 2021 and is truly one of the best debut features of recent years. She has now followed it up with her sophomore feature, April, winner of the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival. April is anchored by Beginning star Ia Sukhitashvili’s powerhouse performance as Nina, an obstetrician in rural Georgia who is accused of malpractice after delivering a stillborn baby. Nina is subsequently subjected to an investigation that threatens to expose her history of flaunting taboo by discreetly providing abortions, and finds herself struggling to bear up under the burden of condemnation from a community whose women desperately need her. Shot in precisely calibrated long takes that practically vibrate with tension by DP Arseni Khachaturan (Beginning, Bones & All), who captures both the beauty and the ominous starkness of the Caucasus, with Matthew Herbert’s asynchronous score adding to the abiding air of anxious disorientation, Kulumbegashvili’s sophomore film invents a startlingly original audiovisual vocabulary to convey its visceral narrative of repression and resistance.
In Georgian with English subtitles. It is $8 for the general public; $7 for seniors, Webster alumni and students from other schools; $6 for Webster University staff and faculty; $0 for Webster students with proper ID.
