Here is a clip from April (Aprili), the award-winning Georgian drama film directed by Dea Kulumbegashvili, starring Ia Sukhitashvili as Nina, an obstetrician in rural Georgia who helps patients seeking abortions despite legal prohibition.
The film, also starring Kakha Kintsurashvili and Merab Ninidze, had its world premiere at the 81st Venice International Film Festival, where it won the Special Jury Prize.
It is playing at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival in the Spotlight section, before opening in select theaters on April 25, 2025 via Metrograph Pictures.
In the movie, Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili) is a skilled obstetrician at a maternity hospital in Eastern Georgia. After a difficult delivery, the infant dies and the grief-racked father demands an inquiry into her methods. The resulting scrutiny threatens to bring to light Nina’s sideline—driving, through the stunningly beautiful countryside to the village homes of pregnant girls and women to provide unsanctioned abortions—and to destroy the profession that is the only source of meaning in her life.
For April, her second feature following 2020’s acclaimed Beginning, Dea Kulumbegashvili spent months observing the work of doctors at a maternity clinic and the lives of the surrounding rural communities. The story she crafted is grounded in realistic detail and was brought to life by an intensive rehearsal and production process, with a cast that includes accomplished Georgian theater and film actors (Sukhitashvili, Kakha Kintsurashvili, Merab Ninidze) alongside nonprofessionals.
Said Director Dea Kulumbegashvili, “April is my humble tribute to Georgia, perhaps showing a world full of pain but also of tremendous beauty. Traveling from one village to another, witnessing the lives of women in shadows of the village houses, hearing up the faint voices of those who felt trapped into their own fates… April grew into a testimony of overwhelming, unbearable empathy and shuttering feeling of helplessness. Perhaps in places April manifests itself as a feverish dream entranced with anxiety and anger but nevertheless it is an expression of love to the place where I come from and that I’ll always carry with me.”
Watch a clip from April directed by Dea Kulumbegashvili.