In a Lonely Place: Shooting April

In April (2024), the second feature from Georgian filmmaker Dea Kulumbegashvili, the world appears at once staggeringly vast and terrifyingly constrictive. Shot on location in Lagodekhi, a rural town at the foot of the Caucasus Mountains, the film is enveloped by the rapturous beauty of the landscape. The open sky, emanating hues of violet and blue, stretches to infinity. Meanwhile, within the cheerless corridors of a maternity ward, the walls are closing in on Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili), an obstetrician who carries out illegal abortions in the village. After a tragic case of stillbirth happens under her watch, she faces intense scrutiny which threatens to derail her already solitary life.

As with Kulumbegashvili’s haunting debut feature Beginning (2020), also starring Sukhitashvili, the loneliness of women living under patriarchal oppression manifests in intimate, and even unearthly, details. Nina’s isolation is felt in her nocturnal drives along winding roads, where she stumbles from one casual encounter to another. Drained of lasting human connection, her sparse, dimly lit home is just as impersonal and sterile as her workplace. The appearance of a mysterious humanoid creature lends a touch of otherworldliness to the forbidding atmosphere. It is as if Nina’s turmoil, corporealized in a hunched sack of skin and bone, has been let loose.

Unfolding in long takes, these static compositions acquire a painterly somberness, and resemble a never-ending dream or nightmare. Though preoccupied with vital issues, Kulumbegashvili’s filmmaking deliberately rejects social-realist conventions, locating her political inquiry in the unknowable depths of life instead. Her characters might be lonesome souls, but Kulumbegashvili’s vision is built on collaboration. Following a chance meeting in New York, cinematographer Arseni Khachaturan has been working with Kulumbegashvili for more than a decade. Having joined forces for Léthé (2016), Kulumbegashvili’s second short, Beginning, and now April, they have developed an intuitive method of filmmaking which has resulted in some of the most striking images in contemporary cinema. In this exclusive interview, Khachaturan discusses the beauty of shooting on location, his and Kulumbegashvili’s inspirations, and the extraordinary experience of filming a live birth.

MUBI: Having collaborated on multiple films with Dea, what does your process of working together look like?

ARSENI KHACHATURAN: It's a very involved, hands-on approach. We're very close friends who have known each other for over ten years. I spent a lot of time in Georgia for our films, which are all shot either in the town or close to the town where she grew up. So I know her family very well. The way we work is also very slow-paced. I don't think that we separate work from life that much. It's not like an assignment where I have to go and do it, and then leave. When I'm in Georgia, we get in the car, and we drive around for a couple of weeks. We drink some coffee, discuss things, go on trips together, visit museums in Europe, watch movies, go to concerts. It's kind of this one big adventure that started ten years ago and never ended.

MUBI: What were the challenges of shooting on film and on location for you? There are beautiful scenes of the changing weather, like when huge dark clouds appear in the sky. It makes me wonder whether these moments were unexpected.

KHACHATURAN: Yes, but those are not challenges. Those are gifts. You could be setting up to shoot a dialogue scene, then all of a sudden, the weather changes. The clouds are rolling in, and you know something is going to happen. You see the farmers, somewhere in the distance, firing rockets into the clouds to blow up all the hail so it doesn't destroy their harvest. Then, if you can react to it, if you can be nimble and quick on your feet, you can mobilize the crew, go into the field, and change the plan completely. That's a gift, because then it ends up in those marvelous scenes that we have in April. So those are not necessarily challenges. They speak to Dea's talents as a director. How she has her finger on the pulse, so to speak, every day. How observant she is about what's going on.

MUBI: Like Beginning, April was shot in the Academy aspect ratio. Why that choice?

KHACHATURAN: I think our fascination with the tall skies, the mountains, and the vertical orientation of the world is one reason. Portraits in Academy ratio have a completely different photographic and human quality to a wider aspect ratio, which is also interesting and has its own uses, but is less suited for what we wanted to do with this film. With Dea, it’s about distilling everything to its bare essence. Beginning, for example, is shot with one lens. April is shot predominantly with an 18mm lens, except for two shots. Everything unnecessary goes away. We said, "Okay, so we're gonna have one camera, one lens, one aspect ratio, and that's how we want to do it." When you commit to these tools, it leaves you in a place where you can actually pay attention to what’s in front of the camera, as opposed to worrying too much about technicalities. It allows us to implement a worldview.

MUBI: And what are the two shots in April that were filmed with a different lens?

KHACHATURAN: There is a scene at the hospital toward the end where we have the main character, Nina, speaking with another doctor, her colleague who is also her ex-partner. There is  a wide shot, followed by two close-ups with the characters looking almost directly into the lens. Those two shots were made with a 35mm lens.

MUBI: It's interesting that you mention this scene because I love the way conversations are shot in this film. There are not a lot of reverse shots. The camera usually focuses on one person, and sometimes you don't see the other party at all.

KHACHATURAN: Yes, that came from Dea. There is a certain verbal agreement between us: We don't shoot coverage. I don't really think that coverage has anything to do with the kind of films we make. It’s not how people talk in the real world. Every time there's a close-up, it has a huge impact, because all of a sudden you're so close to the person. It makes people way more human, as opposed to shooting coverage and dialogue, which I suppose is great for editing purposes. Some directors are editors at heart, and they make their films in the editing room. But that is not how we see it, or how Dea wants to make her films. So it came from her and her vision. Coverage shots just don't belong in her films at all, so far.

MUBI: There's also a painterly stillness to the composition in April, like a kind of portraiture. At the same time, the framing has a deliberate shakiness as well. The images are adrift in the way that Nina is also adrift.

KHACHATURAN: We wanted April to feel very tactile and immersive. One of the things that fascinated us in preproduction was computer games. We were talking about point of view—first-person and third-person point of view—in video games. They have so much more inventiveness and freedom compared to what we have in cinema, which is kind of dragging its feet. Neither of us really plays games, but we tried a bunch of them, like Death Stranding by [Hideo] Kojima. These games influenced our camera choices for the film. We wanted to feel what the protagonist felt. We wanted the camera to breathe, to be alive. There are a lot of long takes—most of which are handheld—of her breathing for five, seven, even ten minutes. The sound work that Dea did in postproduction, which incorporated all the breathing that she recorded, elevated that camera language. When sound and image collide, it creates this fascinating language where we can occupy her point of view. We can see her gaze and hear her. We can be very present in the film. 

MUBI: The comparison to video games, and your discussion about point-of-view shots, reminds me of the various driving sequences in the film. These shots are striking because, at times, you feel like you're seeing the road through Nina's eyes. Then suddenly the camera seems to move on its own, seeing things that would not have been in her line of vision.

KHACHATURAN: That idea came from not wanting the camera to be inside the car. We wanted to hear the sounds of her body, but for the camera to be free. We wanted the camera to fly through this vast and picturesque region. Because Nina is always out at night, wandering around, offering herself to total strangers, we wanted the night scenes to be shot at the magic hour. It created a sense of this never-ending insomnia, this never-ending night. We just mounted the camera in front of the car. The images are then overlaid with the sounds that Dea recorded inside the car.

MUBI: I’m quite moved by the colors in the film. There are a lot of blues that come from the sky or the falling rain. Nina's scrubs are also blue. And then there are these shots of red poppies or pink blossom that create such a strong contrast to what came before.

KHACHATURAN: We were fascinated with the flowers. We found a peach garden where we shot pink flowers against the sky. Dea just thought it was incredibly beautiful, and that we had to do it. Something compelled her to do it. Life is so incredibly beautiful. It’s a general, mutual understanding between me and her, this never-ending fascination and gratefulness to life, and the sadness that, at some point, it will end. The idea to capture that beauty and to have it in the film came from that reasoning. Another reason would be: It's such a beautiful place, where we made the film, and it's such a not-so-beautiful society. What happens to the main characters in the film is not necessarily pretty, but juxtaposing that with the beauty of nature and the beauty of the world around these people is something that we talked about.

MUBI: I'm also struck by what looks like a live-birth scene in the beginning. What was the technical reality of shooting such an event?

KHACHATURAN: It’s not easy to get access to filming something like this. In preproduction, Dea spent a lot of time in the maternity ward of a hospital. Weeks after weeks and months after months, she was with doctors and women who were coming for checkups. She was learning about how things happen, and developing trust with the hospital staff. As we were approaching principal photography, there were women who were interested and were willing to have us in the room when they gave birth. We just had to be very careful because under no circumstance could we intervene in or change the process of a person being born. So when you're in the hospital, you have to tread very lightly. The majority of the hospital scenes—all those rooms and offices—are filmed on a set, built inside an abandoned building, except for the maternity ward where the birth happens and the incubator room. We basically had to pre-rig everything: prepare the camera, put it on a dolly, get everything ready, load the magazine, and leave it there. And then, we were just waiting. There were many sleepless nights when we were sitting at the hotel, drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, and waiting for a phone call. 

One night, around four in the morning, we got a call from the hospital saying that she's on the way and it's happening. We banged on every door to wake up the crew, got everybody in the car, and went super fast across town. We changed, sanitized, put on the gowns, jumped into the room, and got behind this curtain. Then, it just happened. It was very normal, somehow, but just being in the room was profoundly life-changing for me. I was like, "Oh, that's what cinema could be." That's what we could do. We got it on the first take, but we had to prepare a lot. I saw a lot of childbirths in preproduction, so that I'd know what to expect. A very, very singular experience in my life for sure.

MUBI: I want to talk about the creature, which is such an unusual touch in the film. How much of that was done in camera?

KHACHATURAN: Everything. It's a full prosthetics costume made of silicon. Everything was done in camera for the creature. It took a very long time to apply the makeup. That was a hideously difficult process for the actor. But we needed it to be on camera. We always tried to put everything in front of the camera. 

MUBI: There's something I noticed in Léthé, Beginning, and now in April. Even though there's a stillness to the framing, there's a certain panning movement near the end of these films that reveals a piece of information or gives some sort of emotional weight. In April, we see a close-up of a grieving couple talking to the doctors, and then the camera pans away from them to show Nina, her colleague, and her boss. I’m curious if that kind of camera movement is driven dramaturgically or technically.

KHACHATURAN: Interesting. I never thought about these movements as arriving toward the end of the film. But it is something that comes from Dea. It's driven dramaturgically, and she knows exactly when she needs it. In Beginning, there were two or three pans. There were about 74, 75 shots, and only two or three pans. The rest are just static frames. Every time the pan happens, it definitely makes you pay attention as a viewer. You get so accustomed to still frames that, every time the camera moves, it carries an impact. The same goes for April. Despite the camera being very alive—animated and present—those pans are very deliberate and very impactful.