Déa Kulumbegashvili's sophomore feature, about a brave obstetrician, is riveting and disturbing.

By Siddhant Adlakha 
September 7, 2024

Déa Kulumbegashvili's April is a bone-rattling drama about what it means to be a woman in the country of Georgia. The nation's laws permit pregnancy termination only up to 12 weeks — before some people even know they're expecting — and even then, rural stigma prevents many of them from accessing care. Kulumbegashvili places her protagonist Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili) against this volatile backdrop, as an obstetrician who risks her career by driving to far-flung villages to help pregnant women in need of abortions.

While the film's focus is the aspersions cast on Nina's character, it tells its story in oblique ways, with stunning confrontations of violence and bodily function that form a visceral fabric. The film presents life as an overlapping showreel of birth, death, pregnancy, abortion, and sex, all facets of female experience that Kulumbegashvili merges into a monstrous beast — not just narratively, but literally, through nightmarish imagery.

Continued: https://mashable.com/article/april-review