Ia Sukhitashvili is Nina in “April.”
“Déa Kulumbegashvili’s feature film, about a brave obstetrician, is riveting and disturbing, 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….
“Take, for instance, a lengthy abortion scene. When Nina helps a young mute girl, Nana (Roza Kancheishvili), terminate her pregnancy, Kulumbegashvili’s camera — courtesy of cinematographer Arseni Khachaturan — focuses not on any one character, but the meeting of hands and bodies. The procedure itself is obscured, but the frame’s focus is Nana’s torso as she lies on a plastic tablecloth. On one side of the frame, Nina works diligently to protect the young girl’s future. On the other side, the girl’s mother, Mzia (Ana Nikolava), holds and comforts her. It’s a traumatic sequence due to the emotions it expresses and conjures by juxtaposing a mother’s act of love with a daughter’s yelps of pain, through a procedure that could have its own serious consequences, should it be discovered.
“The women in April are all caught between a rock and a hard place, and Nina’s story embodies theirs in microcosm. She becomes, in the process, a kind of cypher of womanhood, and at times she even imagines herself as the formless creature (especially when she sleeps with one of her superiors), as though her self-perception and fears of ageing were tied to pregnancy and sex. Her personal relationship to pregnancy, however, is never clarified — whether she’s ever been pregnant, or had an abortion herself — because she seems to wall that part of herself off from other people. Perhaps it’s necessary for the job.”
SOURCE: Mashable.com. Review of the film “April”, by Siddhant Adlakha, 7 September 2024. VISUAL: Courtesy of Venice Film Festival.