(L-R) Dea Kulumbegashvili and Alexandra Rossi attend the 2025 Sundance Film Festival premiere of “April” at The Egyptian Theatre on January 23, 2025, in Park City, UT. (Photo by Andrew H. Walker/Shutterstock for Sundance Film Festival)
By Sandy Phan
You can tell that Georgian writer-director Dea Kulumbegashvili and producer Alexandra Rossi are good friends. Standing on stage, they exude a level of comfort and confidence that comes from a shared experience — the experience of making April, which Kulumbegashvili explains “is a film rooted in a female experience.” Rossi adds, “The thing that was really exciting for me was to work with a bold filmmaker who would not accept compromises.” Certainly, one aspect of this is seen as footage of actual childbirth is incorporated into the film.
A Spotlight title at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, April tells the story of Nina (la Sukhitashvili), an obstetrician in Eastern Georgia, whose unofficial side job provides women in the village with choices for pregnancy prevention and abortions. Following a complicated childbirth at the hospital, the infant dies, and the father of the infant demands an investigation into Nina’s role as the obstetrician.
Filmed near her hometown, Kulumbegashvili was personally connected to the film’s location and the people who lived there. She spent time talking to the women in the village. “I understood better what their lives were made of and the things they were most concerned about … The film came to me on its own and for me to make it.”
The film is grounded in the sounds of rain and animals, with long takes to create purposefulness, even an uncomfortableness that Kulumbegashvili wants us to feel. April is about the intimate reproductive choices and options that women in rural locations have. She shares that, “For me, cinema is an experience, and often it’s an experience of life, and maybe we’re not grasping in the moment of life.”
