Dea Kulumbegashvili's April & Dissociation

How Cinematography Makes Alienation Appear

Author

Justin Goodman
June 20, 2025

“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.”

 -Dea Kulumbegashvili speaking to Marya E. Gates

 

Dea Kulumbegashvili does a weird thing in her second feature film, April: the subject of the shot is often out of frame. Focusing on the alienation of an obstetrician in rural Georgia, Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili), who provides illegal abortions, the most definitive scene for this weirdness is, fittingly, a lengthy dinner table abortion. The film begins with a direct, unblinking, overhead shot of a live birth – a real birth by a non-actor – only for us to later witness the abortion pinched into the profile of a deaf-mute teen’s upright legs and torso. For 10 minutes, or what feels like 10 minutes, she huffs and squirms as Nina (an implied presence off screen) and the teen’s mother (a gently touching hand) comfort her.

Now there’s a lot of reasons why you might position a viewer off-center from the focus of a shot, up to and including being slapdash about what you’re communicating. One of my favorite examples of this is in the first season of Love Is Blind when Lauren is talking to her friend Tiffany. It’s a conventional shot-reverse shot where we look over Tiffany’s shoulder as Lauren talks, over Lauren’s shoulder as Tiffany talks. Until Lauren starts to mimic a third perspective with her hand. Suddenly, we’re behind Lauren as her hand talks, throwing off the rhythm and logic of the scene. We’re Tiffany’s rapt attention revealed by Lauren’s faceless self-puppetry. It’s an unsettlingly earnest portrayal of a genre where we indulge in grafting an image onto people attempting to create an image of themselves with and against producers and editors focused on audience growth and viewer retention.

Kulumbegashvili is obviously more intentional than Love is Blind, but it shakes out to the same theme. In an Indie Wire Toolkit interview she says as much. During an evening drive Nina picks up a hitchhiker who she gives a blowjob shortly after. This is all from a first-person perspective of the hitchhiker, a still shot pointing at the dark beyond the driver side window so that Nina vanishes as she goes down on him:

I think that I wanted to work with who’s watching, the question of perception, despite it being a man…I wanted the audience to be put in the position of this man, even though we experience this scene from her point of view. It was something interesting because somehow we have two point of views, and one is ours…

 

This sort of dual-perspective is extremely uncomfortable. It’s the dream passive voice clotted with “one is ours,” something like bitumen centennially dripping through a funnel. What Kulumbegashvili and the Love is Blind editing ask is “the question of perspective”: who can look? Not in the voluntaristic sense of paying attention, but in the existential sense of how has life made seeing possible for some – what does seeing look like?

This is the point Kulumbegashvili makes in a separate interview at Lincoln Center. She wonders “where is cinema at as an audiovisual form of art when life that’s filmed around us is so impossible to look at?” The abortion scene is her cubistic answer. It’s literally impossible to look at, not only because it’s not an actual abortion (contra the opening birth), but down to the framing the camera rejects point of view, slicing off the context given by a human’s most expressive features. While the actress conveys much as torso, legs, and groans, enough that it becomes difficult to sit with it for its unblinking length, it remains in the dissociative atmosphere of trauma. This is traumatic reading is ultimately made explicit by the off-screen death of the deaf-mute teen, murdered by the father who had impregnated her.

This is the unspeakable that lurks throughout the movie as a mythical, ephemeral hag-like being, always walking away from the viewer. It’s a creature which Kulumbegashvili has said is “real” – realer than “the light that goes with you wherever you walk” (talking about lighting the evening drive sequence) – which captures that fleeting, insightful moment of Love Is Blind editing. She’s a puppet. More than a puppet of some mind splicing clips in Adobe Premiere, of herself, trapped in the third space between embodiment and possession by the viewer. It’s the third space common to alienation, the deaf-mute experience of an abused child unable to seek medical care due to legal authorization of religious and cultural bigotry.

As a passing thought, it’s interesting to note that Kulumbegashvili was pregnant for the first months of shooting. The perpetual awareness that you are embodied and not fully your own person, no longer obscured to self-recognition, is brought to the extreme during pregnancy. In a very concrete sense it induces “two points of view, and one is ours.” And in the same way a viewer grafts an image onto a reality star, structured by the larger forces of production, a parent grafts a future onto their child that will ultimately be shaped by such forces; forces beyond perceptibility. That the image was a projection, obscurely. What would seeing look like in such a space where the subject is just off screen?

 

 

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