With April, Dea Kulumbegashvili brings to the Lido the biggest surprise of the 2024 Venice Film Festival, shocking and dividing the audience. Provocative at its core, April is as radical in style as in its narrative, exploring a week in the life of gynaecologist Nina, who also carries out illegal abortions in rural Georgia. Nina lives an austere and dissatisfied existence, split between giving life in the hospital and taking it whenever it's needed in the countryside, helping young women to gain their lost freedom while risking to lose her own. Apathetic and cold, the only relationships she has are occasional, brief, and squalid encounters with strangers on the street: there is no warmth in her world. With extremely long, constantly oscillating hand-held shots, the film tests the viewers’ limits, also because these enduring takes often depict highly disturbing scenes. Always bearing an intense harshness in every frame, even the non-violent moments express the Georgian director’s uncompromisingness, like in the film’s opening, when a single-take birth scene prompted the audience to sprint out of the press screening in flocks. We want to look away, but the she is in full control of the frame, and hypnotises our curiously doomed gaze.
The sound design is equally masterful, allowing Kulumbegashvili to fully engage with what is happening in the off-screen space, and providing an even more immersive, and disquieting, atmosphere, full of pantings, thunders, and the cold tinkling of rain over metal which serve as the film’s chilling soundtrack.
April is definitely not everyone’s cup of tea, but Kulumbegashvili’s obsessively uneasy and contemplative pictures will leave a mark for anyone that dares to watch it. April won the Special Jury Prize at the 2024 Venice Film Festival.
4/5
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