Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.Whatever \u201cart cinema\u201d is these days \u2014 and it can be many, many things \u2014 it is very much an endangered species in a harsh commercial environment. As a matter of survival, many filmmakers have retreated into varying degrees of conservatism and caution. That is why April is such an inspiring anomaly: this second feature from Georgian writer-director Dea Kulumbegashvili is uncompromising both in theme and in style.Kulumbegashvili made a stir with her 2020 debut Beginning, a nightmarish drama set in a Jehovah\u2019s Witnesses community. In April \u2014 with star auteur Luca Guadagnino among its producers \u2014 Kulumbegashvili pushes the boat out even further, beginning with the enigmatic and disturbing opening shot. It shows a stooped naked figure, faceless and with a body seemingly of clay, slowly wading through a black lake in darkness.Most of the film follows a realist path, however stylised. Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili) is an obstetrics doctor in a provincial Georgian hospital. She is first seen at the birth of a new baby \u2014 evidently an actual delivery, shot directly from above \u2014 but spends much of her time driving to a nearby village, where she provides care and performs abortions for women in poor families. Sometimes, she stops en route for impromptu sexual encounters, one of which ends brutally \u2014 but, disconcertingly, without further comment.When a newborn at the hospital dies, Nina is held responsible. Her colleague David (Kakha Kintsurashvili) must investigate; but he is also her ex-partner, unable to understand why she has chosen to pursue her vocation rather than start a life with him or anyone else.This is a film of few words, the wan, often unreadable Sukhitashvili suggesting at once fragility and self-possessed control; people tend to talk around or at Nina, whose opaque silence is the film\u2019s base note. Nor does April itself give much away. Its theme is very resonant at a time when abortion as a practice is under intense attack, but rather than tell a transparent, polemically angled story, Kulumbegashvili takes an oblique approach. She foregrounds style of an austere, sometimes disorienting sort. Rooms, shot from one end then the other, seem unnaturally elongated. In one extended sequence, the camera drifts upwards from a close-up of grass in the rain until we catch sight of Nina\u2019s car stalled in the far distance on a muddy road, squeezed into a corner of the screen.Then there\u2019s the recurring creature, not quite fully formed \u2014 seemingly an incarnation of Nina herself, or so POV shots and an insistent sound of breathing would suggest. But it\u2019s not easy to pin a clear meaning on this figure: the film leaves it to our interpretation, and our anxious imagination.You could easily imagine April screened in a gallery as video art: part of its brilliance is in the tension it maintains between storytelling and a hardcore commitment to the imagistic. Lovers of that elusive quasi-genre \u201cslow cinema\u201d might detect affinities with directors such as B\u00e9la Tarr, Carlos Reygadas or the late Chantal Akerman. But Kulumbegashvili is very much exploring her own path here, fearlessly so.\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605In UK cinemas from April 25<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.Whatever \u201cart cinema\u201d is these days \u2014 and it can be many, many things \u2014 it is very much an endangered species in a harsh commercial environment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":289465,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-289464","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/289464","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=289464"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/289464\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":289466,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/289464\/revisions\/289466"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/289465"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=289464"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=289464"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=289464"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}