Acclaimed Georgian filmmaker Dea Kulumbegashvili makes films that transport the viewer both to the rural region, at the foot of the Caucasus Mountains, where she was raised, but also to another realm of experience, made possible through the language of cinema. Like many of her contemporaries, Kulumbegashvili’s films are marked by her childhood during the Georgian Civil War. Kulumbegashvili eventually moved to New York City, where she enrolled in Media Studies at The New School and later earned a Master of Fine Arts in Film Directing at the Columbia University School of the Arts.
In 2014 her short film “Invisible Spaces (Ukhilavi Sivrtseebi)” screened at the Cannes Film Festival where it competed for the Short Film Palme d’Or. Two years later her short film “Lethe,” which began her long-time collaboration with Arseni Khachaturan, also screened at the prestigious festival. Her debut feature film “Beginning,” which centers on the wife of a Jehovah’s Witness leader (Ia Sukhitashvili) whose beliefs are shook to the core after their place of worship is firebombed, debuted at the virtual edition of the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2020 where it won the FIPRESCI Prize. The film screened at several other international film festivals, including the San Sebastián International Film Festival where it holds the record for most competition wins, taking home prizes for Best Film, Best Director, Best Screenplay and Best Actress. The film was also selected as the Georgian entry for the Best International Feature Film at the 93rd Academy Awards.
Kulumbegashvili re-teamed with Sukhitashvili for her second feature film, “April,” in which the actress stars as Nina, an obstetrician in rural Georgia who also covertly aids her patients with birth control and performs illegal abortions. When an emergency birth overseen by Nina suddenly turns to tragedy, she becomes the subject of a negligence investigation which could expose her illicit actions and threaten her entire future. The esoteric drama, which features both immersive static shots of medical procedures and otherworldly tableaus featuring a crone-like creature, premiered at the 81st Venice International Film Festival, where it won the Special Jury Prize.
For this month’s Female Filmmakers in Focus column, RogerEbert.com spoke to Kulumbegashvili over Zoom about the current state of Georgian cinema in the wake of the country’s current political climate, capturing the female experience on film, and using cinema to explore life beyond what is knowable.
I saw this film at TIFF, and it was very late at night, and it was quite an experience. It was really interesting to watch the audience react. In a lot of your interviews you have discussed the different ways people have perceived the film. Coming out of the festival experience, have you been surprised by any of the responses to the film?
It’s always interesting to see all kinds of reactions, because you can never really know how a film will be received. I’ve been told by some people that it was a terribly disappointing experience; not that they hated the film or something, but it was like, “Oh, my god, is this even a film experience?” Others have been very positive, and I’m very grateful for positive feedback as well. But, as a director, you can’t really say which kind of response is the most surprising, or even which is the most important. In a way, I’m glad if my film disappoints some people, because I don’t think that a film needs to be cheerful or to cater to anybody’s experiences of what film needs to be, as long as I am able to make films at least. Because maybe at some point we’ll be unable to make films that do not fall into that standard of what cinema needs to be. I hope we don’t get to that point.
In the last decade or so there’s been a lot of women in Georgia making, really, I think boundary pushing films, like “Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry” and “My Happy Family.” Do you feel as if you’re part of a movement of women telling stories through film from Georgia?
I don’t think there is any planned movement, because I don’t really know Elene Naveriani, who made the “Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry.” I really love her film, but I have never met her. I like Nana Ekvtimishvili and Simon Groß, who made “My Happy Family.” I have met them, but I don’t really know them well either. I don’t know what would define a wave. It’s not like we are actively communicating. I think that what’s important is that maybe there is this very turbulent situation, and so there is some sense of urgency, and we all feel this, and that pushes us to make films the way we do. But I don’t see what would define it as a wave.
I was telling other journalists that sadly there is no wave anymore, and there will be no more Georgian cinema in the coming years, that I know for sure. There is no possibility in Georgia to make films. I certainly cannot make films. There is no way for me. I think for Nana, I don’t think she would be able to make a film either, because of the political situation. For Elene, I don’t know honestly, because I really never met her, so I can’t talk on her behalf. But overall, I would say that if you see a Georgian film in the coming years, it will be because of some kind of a miracle that somebody was able to make a film. I don’t know how that would happen. Or it will be a film that the government allowed to happen. I don’t know why that would happen.
I was listening to one of Nana’s interviews a couple of days ago on YouTube. I really share her point of view that we’re dealing in Georgia with something that is so upsetting. We’re losing our country, basically, maybe we already lost our country, and we just don’t understand it. Georgia is a very small country. Internationally, Georgia is not very important. Sadly, not many people pay attention to what’s happening there. There are people who are arrested. There are actors who were in prison.
I personally have emailed your colleagues, many of them about the actors being arrested, and I was asking for help or for the news to be published, because I feel horrible that we cannot do anything to get the actors released and nobody published it. If I was a Russian director, they would publish it, I guess, because Russia has more importance in terms of global geopolitics, and Georgia nobody really cares about us.
Two days ago, the artistic director of one of the most important theaters in Georgia was fired. Probably all the actors will be fired in the near future as well. So in the context of the entire country, and what’s happening there, we can’t even talk about cinema anymore, because there is no space for such conversations, because we have to talk about how to literally survive, or how to help those who are being arrested and facing seven years in prison, like the actor I mentioned. I’m very sorry, I don’t want to hijack your interview.
Oh, no, this is what I wanted to talk about.
I mean, this is very important. This is a young actor. His name is Andro Chichinadze. He was arrested because he was participating in a protest, and they said he was plotting to attack the police. But there is no proof at all, but nobody cares. The Georgian government understands too well that at the moment, no one has time for Georgia and no one cares. So they use this time to really change things for a very long time to come.
The reason why I asked is I feel like a lot of your films, what you have in common is sort of coming out of the Georgia Civil War and coming of age in sort of new country being built and looking at the cracks. Watching your film, “April,” I felt a lot of parallels to aspects of growing up in the United States, specifically in the rural United States, and the way that our country is also starting to enact a lot of really dangerous laws that particularly hurt rural communities. It was hard not to see the parallels, even though I don’t know if those were necessarily on purpose. Unfortunately, I think it’s just dipping from the same horrible well with what’s going on in the world. I wanted to ask you specifically, knowing you grew rural Georgia, and I grew up in rural America, which are totally different, but there are also a lot of similarities in terms of the way that women are raised, the way that family is looked at, the way that birth and death and abortion and all of that is looked at. How much of that upbringing do you find yourself expressing through cinema?
I did grow up in the exact place where we filmed “April.” That’s my home and is where my family lives. My first feature, which is called “Beginning,” was also made in the same place. I have also made a short film there. My relationship with my home is this, like, tortured love affair. Because I really love it, but at the same time, I can’t just look away and not see the ugliness of it at the same time. It’s just this beautiful place with so much pain and so much tragedy at the same time.
When I was growing up there during the Civil War, we never had electricity. We never had heat. So in a way, for me to even make films . . .I don’t know how it happened, honestly. I had not seen films when I was growing up. The thing is that you need the possibility to talk about it. When you talk about being a Georgian director, you need to understand that my generation of Georgian directors comes from the civil war. We did not grow up with cinema, and we were not running around with VHS cameras given to us by our fathers. So we were literally standing in the line to get some bread, which you can see in Nana’s film “In Bloom.”
At that point, every person was only allowed to buy one loaf of bread. So every morning at 6am my grandmother would take myself and my sister and my grandfather, our entire family, and we would go to buy bread. Everybody needed to get one loaf because who knew what would be the second possibility for you to buy bread; it could be the next week. You really needed to stay fit and that bread was one of the main ingredients of our diet. So, to be able to still see beauty in people and to dream and to see how beautiful the place where I grew up really is, is something for which I’m very grateful. It shows me that it’s possible to love and to be able to laugh and to empathize and to see each other despite the conditions where you grow up.
When I go back there and I see the children growing up there now, yes, they do have food, even though they grow up with a lot of poverty, but they also have almost no options and no possibility to receive any education. Their mothers are often illiterate. Their fathers are extremely violent, which also comes, I believe, from this place of lack of education, lack of understanding that there is a possibility to live in a different way. The Georgian government encourages this, basically because this is something which they use in order to stay in power forever. It’s horrible to see how my country is becoming this closed space, like some sort of experiment.
It’s really sad, because obviously I do see the parallels also with other parts of the world. I mean, who would ever imagine that I would see parallels with the United States? Because this country was supposed to be a land of freedom. We all aspired to come to the United States on this. We grew up singing the American anthem. So I see what is happening here in the United States, and think, “How is this even possible?”
I think your film speaks to a rise in a lot of countries around the globe in trying to take over the autonomy of other people, and, in particular, women. It’s been really difficult to see this movement mainstreamed in the United States. There was always an undercurrent of it, and “hands off our body” has been a phrase since I was a little kid, but it used to be more of a fringe movement, and now it’s in the streets, everyone’s talking about it. I love that your film really looks at birth, abortion, gynecology, all of it as just part of medicine, part of your right as a body to be healthy. You did a lot of deep research on this. Can you talk a little bit about your goals in showing this as a health issue, not just as a political issue or religious issue, but really as a health issue?
I spent at least a year in a clinic. I’m super grateful to all the doctors and the medical personnel, who really allowed me to be present all the time. I used to just sit in their rooms and observe how they were, including working with paperwork and health insurance. For a long time I was thinking that this aspect needed to be part of the film. In Georgia, supposedly people have state health insurance, which obviously doesn’t cover abortion, even if you’re in an emergency situation. So if you have a health emergency and you need to have an abortion, it still does not cover it. Basically, abortion is an abortion, no matter in what conditions, even if you’re dying and it’s a necessity. Also, because of poverty, women need to pay in installments for those emergency abortions, so they have to do extra work, like rowing, like greens and salad leaves. They need to pay the bill in six months or something like that. It’s so absurd.
My objective was to create a film which would be a female experience. A female experience, not only in terms of political activism or the social aspects of it, but literally, physically living in this world. What does it mean for a woman? This film was for me, and is now for me, a collective effort, because it does consist of all the elements brought to me by different women. And because of that, it was very important that the film grasped and captured, first of all, the physical experience. I hope that the rest can be put in or brought in by the viewer.
I really felt that sequence with the way you filmed it just in that one shot. And specifically, I love the way her sister is holding her hand through the whole thing. You feel almost a community between these three women experiencing this together. They’re all touching each other. I thought that was very powerful. I’ve read a few interviews where you talk about making miniatures and other aspects of how you plot out visibly how you film, so I was wondering do you always picture where you’re going to put the camera first and then build from there? How do you realize this is where I want the camera to be?
I was recently talking to my cinematographer about this, saying that what was always important to me is that there is no such a thing as a location. I don’t look at where the film is going to be made in terms of location scouting. For me, it’s here’s the story which happens in this particular place, and this particular place is part of the story, because it is also a character. I believe that cinema happens in the space, so there is no location, but it’s rather a space which is somehow part of the experience for me. So, once I already know the space, then it’s important to understand that this is where the camera is going to be.
I am very familiar with the spaces, and I have been in these houses so many times, and I know how women would sit when they would welcome me. The doctors who helped me, I can’t name the names, they really helped me to see how abortions were made, and the technical supervision in terms of how technically it could happen. We were spending so much time in these interiors when we were rehearsing and practicing and understanding the mechanics of it, so then there comes, somehow, a natural understanding of where the camera will be. My cinematographer was always there, so we would observe everything together, and already knew where the camera would be. That’s when it comes together for me as a film. I don’t know how I will be able to do it from now on, when I cannot make films in Georgia anymore. Honestly, I’m terrified, because I really don’t know what location scouting means, and I can’t even think about it.
The house, for example, which is in the film, this particular house is very important. I first went to this village three years ago. I went to this house to talk to somebody about something and I could see a woman who had this horrible scar on her neck, and she was, even in summer, hiding it. And I understood why that was. I knew her husband, I knew her entire family, her children, everybody. So I really wanted this house to be the house in the film, and we didn’t change anything. Basically, this is how it is. And in that regard, those spaces are also so important, because in a way, we’re witnesses, and we are capturing something which goes beyond just what’s said in the film.
You’ve said that you think cinema is reality merged with a dream. In both your films you have this real, lived experience of growing up in the place where you’re filming. But then your films really do take us to some other place. Obviously you have the crone figure in this, but even in “Beginning,” there’s aspects of that film that are very transcendental, like they bring you to a third space. Is that something that you sort of intuit? I’m always curious when filmmakers are able to take us to that third place, how planned is that? Or how much of that just comes with the speaking through film.
Thank you very much. I am glad if I manage to do it, but then for me, it’s like life is a very specific kind of experience. And sometimes I think that maybe I’m so out of it, like I don’t like, sometimes I feel that maybe I’m just crazy and maybe the way I experience things, others, just, you know, can’t relate. For me, reality goes beyond what is concrete and what we can describe. What’s really important for me is what I cannot describe and what I cannot even grasp, or I cannot point to and I cannot name. In that regard, for me cinema is about basic things which are not named, and which I can’t name.
Like, what is hope? Right? Hope is not something you can describe. I hate to talk about it in any religious terms, like, “I hope to go to Heaven.” It’s very cynical for me to be hoping because, especially because I come from that country which has experience of the Soviet Union, which was built on the notion of hope. But then what really is important about this notion of hope, for me, is that something which I cannot name, is this human experience where I’m here, and I feel that there is a hope in this particular life, especially with the children I see in these villages.
But then also, like the same goes to like, what is cinema? I mean, it’s something which accumulates through the shots, and it accumulates in time and as an experience, when you watch it. It’s not one thing only. So, then, how do you do this as the director? I honestly don’t know. So I always feel that despite all of my formal training and education, I’m still very uneducated in that regard, because I really trust that part of me as a director, that uneducable part of me. I do believe that every person has this part which is impossible to educate, and maybe that’s the part which allows us to see things beyond what we know.
I think your films really do go beyond what we know. I think in particular, the way you use the I’m calling it a crone character, but I know you’ve used a few other phrases, the way that she’s sort of in between civilization and nature. And then the way you incorporate nature into the hospital, it’s just all very integrated in a way that I think is how our brains work. I grew up in a rural environment as well, in a high desert, and that is always in the back of my mind, wherever I am.
Where did you grow up?
I grew up in Northern California. They call it The Great Basin. There’s nobody there.
I have seen pictures, actually, but it looks beautiful.
I like the way you described where you grew up. It’s beautiful, but you can also see the pain. I feel the same way about where I grew up.
Yeah.
Are there any women directors who have inspired you, or whose films you just think are really unique and other people should see?
I mean, at the moment, I know that Film at Lincoln Center is having a retrospective of Kira Muratova, which is obviously, for me, the biggest inspiration. I absolutely admire her. I think she was not appreciated in her lifetime, and she had a very difficult life. When I watch some of her films, I really see my grandmother and my mother and all the women who made it possible for me to be who I am. Also, Larisa Shepitko, who made “The Ascent,” and I know that I’m naming mostly Soviet directors now, but I grew up with a lot of Soviet cinema. When I first started watching films when I was seventeen and eighteen, I was actually watching those films. I hope that everybody will go to watch her films and that now she will start to become more well known, because now we can all see them.
I wanted to ask you about a documentary last year called “Mother and Daughter, or the Night Is Never Complete,” by the Georgian filmmaker Lana Gogoberidze which is about her mother, Nutsa Gogoberidze, who was also a filmmaker.
Yeah, her mother was sent to the gulag. Lana made a film called “The Waltz on the Petschora,” and her mother was one of the first female directors in the world, actually. She was a very interesting woman with a terribly tragic fate. She made the film together with Mikhail Kalatozov called “Mati Samepo.” They showed it about ten years ago at MoMA.
I read about that screening last year when I watched her documentary, and I was like, why are these films not available? Because there’s clips of both Lana’s earlier films and then her mother’s films in the doc and they look so beautiful.
Lana made another incredible film. It’s called “Some Interviews on Personal Matters.” I think that’s how it translates. It’s an incredible film, honestly. So ahead of its time. It feels like somebody could make it now.
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