Jumbo Records' Jack recommends April

In April, Déa Kulumbegashvili conducts a heavyweight meditation on abortion and female sovereignty in modern-day rural Georgia. 

Whilst her debut Beginning owed a clear debt to the films of Michael Haneke, here Kulumbegashvili augments austere and clench-inducing long-takes with free-floating surrealist tableau. A profound dissonance is established from the off as we cut from a strange nocturnal figure toeing the Georgian night-shield to an un-simulated birth sequence, Arseni Khachaturan’s camera fixed at a clinical remove. This bold opening salvo sets in motion the warring planes of the narrative, thrusting us headfirst into Kulumbegashvili’s revolutionary cinema of disquiet.

Films such as Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, Myroslav Slaboshpitsky’s The Tribe or Audrey Diwan’s recent adaptation of Anne Ernaux’s Happening interrogated the morality and legality of abortion in similarly brutal fashion—but with April, Kulumbegashvili deflects straight-up nihilism by way of sustained spiritual interludes. She understands that to represent the real is to distort the real, or to quote the main authority on these matters: 

“The imaginary gaze makes the real something imaginary.” 
Gilles Deleuze, The Brain is the Screen

April thunderclaps us into a shadow world where language has failed; into a stark and cosmic inter-zone that floods the well shaft of human experience in a blaze of transcendent sound and vision. Deep breaths, folks.

By Jack Donnison, Jumbo Records.

April is showing at HPPH from Friday 9th May. You can book tickets here.