Interview: Dea Kulumbegashvili on the Minimalist Aesthetic and Tension of ‘April’

“The director’s place is very humble in the process of making a film,” reflects Georgian filmmaker Dea Kulumbegashvili on the making of her sophomore feature, April. It’s a realization that she pinpoints specifically to a striking shot early in the film in which she and cinematographer Arseni Khachaturan capture a real-life childbirth. For such a fastidious researcher and planner, the experience of learning the limits of her control provided an education in letting go of her best-laid plans and to, well, let life in.

Like many a great filmmaker wielding aesthetic austerity with scalpel-like precision, Kulumbegashvili’s approach isn’t antiseptic. With April, like Beginning before it, the filmmaker tasks other people to fully supply the humanity of the film. That onus lies as heavily with those inside her carefully composed frames as it does on the viewers who gaze at them.

Throughout April, the camera dwells on the quiet agony of obstetrician Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili) during a trying period in her professional life. Following a botched delivery, a client blows open her second shift as an abortionist for rural Georgian women and puts her career in jeopardy.

While Nina’s story moves toward a definitive judgment of her continued occupational status, a second and more ambiguously defined figure looms large. Kulumbegashvili intersperses the appearance of a humanoid creature seemingly on the precipice between life and death throughout the film. She empowers the audience to project their feelings and anxieties onto this unexplained figure. Across both dimensions of April, Kulumbegashvili’s artistic vision is clear, yet her personal vantage point on the events remains deliberately and thrillingly occluded.

I spoke with Kulumbegashvili at the Sundance Film Festival in January, one of many stops along April’s extended festival run. Our conversation covered where research informs dealing with sensitive subject matter, how she conceives of cinema as more than just a series of actions, and why she wants to sabotage expectations every time she makes a film.

How did you approach the sonic element of the film? I know you had some trouble getting the sound on the set of Beginning, so did that process also influence the way that you tackled the sound of April?

This time, we didn’t have problems getting the sound on location because I was recording literally everything. We have hours and hours of recordings of nature. But then in post-production, you start to reinvent your own soundscape. I believe that soundscape consists of everything, starting with the dialogue, the rhythm of the words being said, the timbre of the voice, and also breathing. I edited every single breath of the main character. It’s a bit slower than she actually breathes, and it’s something kind of incomprehensible. But when you watch the film, it’s something that draws you into her same experiences. Those are intuitive things. I don’t plan on doing those, and that’s why I record so much sound.

Does slowing down the breathing also serve to adjust the audience to the time and the tempo of the film itself, especially given the duration of the scenes?

It’s more to be attached to her and [have us] pay attention to her breathing. Because we’re used to paying attention to something that happens on screen, or words. But what if we paid attention just to breathing and the existence of somebody on screen? How do you create space for that? How do you ask the audience to do that? It comes in the process of working on a film. With things I plan in sound, they usually just don’t work because it’s a tangible experience. You need to be hands-on, and that’s why I’m usually panicking in advance. Because I know that in post-production, I’ll regret not having something. I want to have as much as possible.

How do you abandon a pre-planned idea that isn’t working in the edit?

I sacrifice things very easily. On Beginning, I worked with a great sound designer, and I was insisting on certain things. He was like, “This does not work,” but he always tried. And after 15 different ideas, we would get to a point and understand we just need one little, tiny thing, like a whisper. You just need to go through so much. I cannot abandon the process of sound design to anybody, no matter how incredible this person is. I need to be in the room all the time.

You did extensive research for April to understand the experiences of rural women. At what point in the process did you start to realize you have a film?

I do have a story, usually, but then I go find voices that will be heard in the film. The plot is boring for me. I want to lose it in the process. This film is important for me in that regard because I would go to some of the houses, and I could see women with signs of violence that would never heal because they had scars and things like that. And they don’t talk about it. They just talk to you about something else. You have coffee with them, and then you question yourself, “Can I look at this scar?” It makes you feel uncomfortable somehow, and you start to question yourself. “Should I let her know that I see it?” I feel that cinema has the potential to bring those things [to the forefront] without directly talking [about them]. It’s just to be seen and felt that people go through this pain. Those things just happen, and they happen next to us.

You’ve mentioned being surprised at how certain audiences would interpret a simple scene in Beginning. Did anticipating the reaction of the audience influence how you approached the ambiguities of April?

Usually, I don’t want people to be expecting something from me because that’s not a very good position to be in for a director. As a director, you always want to sabotage whatever you expect from yourself. I hate making films that I know how to make. I always want to go into something that is unknown to me. But, of course, I’m also in a dialogue with the viewer, and I’m very grateful that there are people who follow my films, especially film critics and people who write about cinema. It’s interesting to engage in this dialogue. I don’t do something specifically for that, but I’m curious to see how the response is going to be at the same time.

How have the responses been as you’ve toured the film along the global festival circuit?

It’s interesting. Sometimes, I sit in a theater, and there’s this shot of flowers on a huge screen…and somebody starts to walk away from the cinema. You’re like, “What would make you decide [to leave] now? It’s just flowers!” [laughs] But I understand that many people just don’t want to see the beauty of nature. Many people think that cinema needs to be action. Something happening means it’s an action. But I think flowers are something happening as well because they’re in the process of blooming, and I want to capture it. I would be really bored to just watch films where people talk, walk, and do things. I actually fall asleep when I watch films like that, because I need cinema that leaves space for me as the viewer, or requires me to be involved in working with the film as well. But I do see people walking out sometimes, especially from those moments. “A beautiful storm? Oh, I don’t want to see this. Bye.” And I’m like, “Okay, very interesting…”

They can handle a childbirth and an abortion, but they can’t handle flowers?

People walk out on abortion as well, but that’s more understandable because maybe it’s triggering or difficult to watch.

What’s your process of finding the right place for the camera to be in a scene?

We usually have the entire film specifically planned with the cinematographer. We have floor plans—maybe you don’t notice, but many locations are built for the film. The entire hospital is built by us, other than the room where the child is born. In a way, it’s built for me, knowing where I would put my camera in advance. I’m very cautious about optimizing my resources because I don’t like to waste money, and I really think about that in the process. I always want to have all the entire space just for us, because then I can really do very meticulous planning, but also save a lot of money for production. Everybody’s happy.

What about finding the right length to hold the shot? Do you think like an editor?

For me, there’s no such thing as the right length of a shot. I was recently watching David Lynch’s famous video when he says, “Who gives a fuck about how long the scene is playing?” For me, I could never understand what the long shot meant. How long is the long shot, especially in a digital medium? Because I shoot analog, we could only have magazines for five or 11 minutes in Georgia. That was the longest we could go. But I don’t care about the length. I don’t plan to make a long shot of something. I don’t even feel that my film has long shots, honestly.

Something I love about Ia in Beginning is the layered performance within a performance, since the character she plays was an actress. Do you see her character in April as having some of that same tension? Is she also performing?

I know Ia really well, and not only through our work. I know her life, her children, her entire family. She was a child actress, and it’s a different way of life. It’s something which was new for me to discover when I met her, because I didn’t know anybody like that before. She doesn’t know another life of not being an actor, and it’s somehow a fragile way of living. She’s a very particular kind of person, and very precious in a way. You need to allow her to be what she is.

Once, we were walking and talking with her at night, and then she told me, “Let me show you something. Come to my theater.” She’s the main actress of the main dramatic theater in Georgia, and she took me through a service entrance. We walked through these endless hallways, everything was just dark, and nobody was there. She brought me onto the main stage, which is huge, and she turned on all the lights. She said, “Do you want to just sit here for a bit? I come here sometimes at night to calm my fears.” Imagine, being on this huge stage, facing an audience…it’s a different way of being. It was important for me to understand that you always need to give her a stage for her to feel comfortable.

There’s a line that stuck with me in April: “Perhaps God sends us blessings so that we can learn how to overcome despair.” It feels like it could be in either of your features. How has your point of view changed on that concept?

It’s a cynical phrase for me. When we were rehearsing it with the actor, he was like, “Oh my God, this entire monologue sounds so pathetic.” And I was like, “Yes, it is. How do you say it’s when it’s so pathetic?” We recorded 26 versions until it became almost unbearable to listen to. It’s a very religious, or maybe evangelical, understanding of life. I disagree with it, yet it was very important for me to leave the space for the audience to question if they agree.

Thematically, many people would consider something like childbirth and abortion as being at two very opposite ends of the spectrum when it comes to life. But Nina has no problem reconciling them. Did making the film change the way that you thought about the false binary thinking around the subject?

This is interesting because I never thought [of them on] opposite [ends of a spectrum], and then while doing the research, I started to understand that this is how it’s perceived. For me, this film is about being a woman. Women don’t talk about abortion experiences, but they do talk about giving birth, right? But we go through both, and it’s not opposite. Both deal with us, our bodies, and our reproductive abilities. And the question of life and death, which lies also within us. When I first attended a birth, I understood how close this moment is to non-existence. From not being fully in this world to, suddenly, there’s a human with a personality. It’s something magical and very melancholic, sad, and beautiful. It’s everything at the same time.

Did those paradoxes play into the design of the mystical being in April?

Oh yes, because I never wanted the creature to be explained. It was very funny, producers were asking me the most questions about it, like, “Maybe we need to see how she transforms?” They wanted it to be more concrete. But I really hope that I will be able to go more into the irrational while making films because that’s maybe where some truth could be found.

How do you put your artistic intent of distilling a moment down to its essence in practice without oversimplifying it?

It’s work I do with myself. When I understand what I see is brilliant, I start to remove everything that would get in the way of the audience to actually see what’s in front of them. Dreyer would remove all the unnecessary parts of a shot and leave absolutely necessary on screen. I’ve been doing that since my first short film, when having no means taught me many things.

You had a child between the production and release of this film. Did becoming a mother change how you approached anything in the post-production process?

It made me appreciate much more my luck of being able to film a child being born and how vulnerable this child was in the process of us filming him. I understood that this is what makes cinema possible: people who allow this vulnerability to be grasped. You, as a director, need to be so careful and thoughtful at the same time. I want making films to be a caring process. There’s nothing worth any discomfort while making a film.