Dea Kulumbegashvili may be the most well-known filmmaker to emerge in the last decade from Georgia, a country of approximately 3.6 million people that was previously part of the Soviet Union. Her first, “Beginning” (2020), was her country’s submission for the best foreign feature Oscar in 2021, and her most recent, “April,” which premieres in U.S. cinemas on Friday, earned the special jury prize at the 2024 Venice film festival.
However, Kulumbegashvili, who lives in Berlin, does not feel especially welcomed back home.
“April,” about a doctor who conducts illegal abortions, has not been screened in Georgia. “It has no distribution potential because no one wants to deal with something that would cause a problem with the authorities,” Kulumbegashvili explained in a video interview.
Though abortion is allowed in Georgia for pregnancies of less than 12 weeks, the reality for women, particularly those living outside big cities, is challenging. The great majority of Georgians are Orthodox Christians, and conventional beliefs about gender roles and domesticity prevail in most households.
The film was “essentially shot in secret,” according to Kulumbegashvili. She did not seek local finance, instead depending on her producers, including Luca Guadagnino, the Italian director of “Challengers” and “Call Me by Your Name,” to get foreign funding.
Kulumbegashvili grew up in Lagodekhi, a tiny village at the foot of the Caucasus Mountains on the border with Azerbaijan, where both “Beginning” and “April” were shot. According to Kulumbegashvili, underage marriage is a problem in the town.
The filmmaker, now 39, recalled her childhood best friend getting married when she was 15. “I recently rewatched a video recording of her wedding,” she told me, “and even though everyone was having a great time, it was clearly a tragic thing.”
The minimum legal marriage age in Georgia is 18, but Kulumbegashvili claims that officials frequently turned a blind eye to minor marriages, especially when they involved bride abductions. According to the UN Population Fund, around 14 percent of Georgian females marry before the age of 18.
When Kulumbegashvili was in Lagodekhi filming “Beginning,” which is about the battered wife of a Jehovah’s Witness leader, she met youngsters from schools around the region as part of an extensive street-casting process.
