‘Beginning' and ‘April' director interview: ‘I make films to grasp the true beauty of human nature'
Both films star Ia Sukhitashvili. Cinematographer Arseni Khachaturan has shot the movies on 35mm film stock, creating mesmerising visual landscapes that throb with colour, texture, light and feeling.
In Beginning, Sukhitashvili plays Yana, the wife of a Jehovah's Witness preacher who is deeply affected when extremists torch the group's church. Yana's growing distance from her husband, her attitude towards their son, and her retreat into herself are portrayed through lengthy takes, several silences and startling ellipses.
April is even more ambitious and transgressive than Beginning. The film follows Nina, an obstetrician who conducts illegal abortions, and who is accused of causing the death of one of her patients. An early graphic sequence of an actual birth is the first indication of April 's bold atmospherics. Nina's experience is interspersed with sightings of a spectral figure – a woman with a withered body and heavy breathing.
Sound is as vital to Kulumbegashvili's rigorous formalism as the images, she told Scroll. Kulumbegashvili trained in filmmaking at the Columbia University School of the Arts. Before directing features, Kulumbegashvili made two well-received short films.
The film company MUBI is showing Beginning and April on its streaming platform. Kulumbegashvili spoke to Scroll about her writing process, her philosophy behind the long take, and her equation with Arseni Khachaturan. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.
What is your writing process like?
It's strange. I always call my writing process very messy. It's kind of like going in circles and detouring a lot because I hate to invent things, but I'm also very good at that sometimes.
I want to be able to grasp what is real, and what is really happening in front of me. I am very curious to see small things, invisible tragedies almost.
A very good friend once told me that unimportant things are really difficult to write about. I believe that.
It's easy to create a three-act structure and grand narratives. There are people who do it really well, and it's not necessary for me to be part of that group. I can maybe do something that fewer people are interested in, which looks at more intimate, smaller things.
How do you communicate your ideas to your producers?
Reading the script is a different experience. There's a lot of struggle to keep the faith that what I wrote is going to be a film. When I give the script to producers, it's not immediately recognised as something that is happening.
When I was making Beginning, I remember that not even one film institution outside of Georgia at that point gave us financing. We received many questions from established, renowned institutions that support art – what is this script about, what's happening in this script? Because it was believed that nothing is happening.
I was asked to change the ending because there is no hope, I told that I need to show women in the places where there is oppression.
That's something that really bothers me. I don't make films to put out a false idea of hope. I make films to grasp the true beauty of human nature, the tragedy.
I believe in humans and humanism. I can't lie and look away when something is ugly or not pleasant to look at. Those things are usually in my script, and it's usually not easy to read.
Beginning has a fantastic sequence of Ia Sukhitashvili lying on the ground for several minutes with her eyes closed. What was the starting point of that film, and of April?
In Beginning, the first image I wrote was the final scene, when she sits at the table with her back to her husband, when she says I killed him [her son]. People asked me, doesn't she love him? Yes, she does, and that's the problem. Because if you don't love somebody, you just get up and leave, right? But this is more tragic for me.
It's not that easy to just get out. It's easier maybe to detach somehow. But when love is involved, it's more painful.
When I was writing April, there were these very tangible, physical experiences of Nina standing in a field. The wind hits her face and the wind is coming from flowers. I used to say, this is the sound of flowers in the wind. And everybody was like, what do you mean? It's just wind.
I was really annoying people with that. I have so many hours of sound recorded for April. I was convinced that we needed to invent the entire method of vertically and horizontally separating the spaces and recording all of it. That's usually part of my writing process – what we hear is part of the narrative.
Play
What conversations do you have with Arseni Khachaturan, who has shot both your films?
Right now, we're working on something. We are talking about a script that doesn't exist so far. I know how I want to shoot it and Arsene knows that it's in my head, but I'm not very coherent in this regard.
The film we are working on has a really visual process. I have been telling him that I don't want the film to be glamorous, because this specific method [that she is pursuing] could be associated with glamorous. Can we go totally different?
It irritates me, the perfection of the image that a technical approach allows. I just can't stand it. want to use it for seeing imperfections. He's like, okay.
What is your dynamic with Khachaturan on the set?
Sometimes I annoy Arseni because I like to use heavy cameras. It's important for me that the camera feels heavy. Of course, it's not good for Arseni because he operates the camera himself.
But he understands why am I so convinced that I need to feel the breathing, the heavy movement. Arseni is very intuitive. He's a very sensitive person. For him, it's very important to be in sync with the actors because he needs to feel what's actually happening in front of the camera.
We're always together on the set. We always stand together. It's never that I'm at the monitor and he's at the camera. It's important for me to whisper, somehow. I don't like to shout and scream on the set. It's a very intimate process.
We need to see the film that's appearing in front of us. It's not just something we're creating. We need to see how it creates itself.
What is your philosophy behind the long take?
I never thought that I was making long takes. I'm able to do 11-minute takes because the film stock magazines are of this length. So I can't do it any longer – I would have if I could. Also, I cannot shoot on digital.
It's important to accumulate cinema. It's an accumulative process. Sometimes I need more time for this to happen.
Play
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Scroll.in
31 minutes ago
- Scroll.in
‘A backdrop of geological time': Gurnaik Johal on why his novel has the river Saraswati in it
Gurnaik Johal is a writer from West London. His 2022 short story collection, We Move, won the Somerset Maugham Award and the Tata Literature Live! Prize. Its opening story won the Galley Beggar Short Story Prize. Saraswati, his debut novel, was published recently by Serpent's Tail in the UK and Hachette in the Indian subcontinent. It was shortlisted for the 2025 Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize. The novel follows the mythical river of Saraswati through what is now Northern India. But when Satnam arrives in his ancestral village for his grandmother's funeral, he is astonished to find water in the long-dry well behind her house. The discovery sets in motion a contentious scheme to unearth the lost river and build a gleaming new city on its banks, and Satnam – adrift from his job, girlfriend and flat back in London – soon finds himself swept up in this ferment of Hindu nationalist pride. As the river alters Satnam's course, so it reveals buried ties to six distant relatives scattered across the globe – from an ambitious writer with her eye on legacy to a Kenyan archaeologist to a Bollywood stunt double – who are brought together in a rapidly changing India. In a conversation with Scroll, Johal talked about how he found the novel's voice, created his characters, and addressed the tension between inherited memory and lived reality. Excerpts from the interview: Many congratulations on your excellent debut novel! Right off, I'm quite curious to know if you began this story with a central thread or if you first collected the voices, let them speak, and only later noticed how they echoed across continents and generations? Thank you! The main structure of the book was in place very early in the writing process – from the start, I knew I'd be following seven different characters who were each distantly related to one another. What came as a surprise in the writing was that we would also get access to the story of these characters' two common ancestors. Following the historical love story of that one couple, which I think in a sense is now the heart of the book, was a lot of fun. In the online space, I noticed many people (including reviews) have drawn parallels between your writing and that of David Mitchell, Zadie Smith, and the like. But your writing also has this quiet wit and humour in surprising places and restraint in other parts that feel very much your own. On that, could you share more on what shaped the tone of Saraswati for you? Are there any writers or books in particular you found yourself returning to while writing it, and drew inspiration? I drew influences from far and wide, and one that comes to mind now is the films of Werner Herzog. Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo are stories of rivers, colonialism and madness, and resonated very strongly with what I was trying to achieve. I remember returning to some sequences in Aguirre several times in the writing process, and the opening music of the film was part of a roster of songs I'd often play to get into the mood to write. More often than not, professions like eco-activists, entomologists, and archaeologists are written with more symbolic weight than emotional intimacy. How did you resist that tendency and ensure these characters remained complex and breathing individuals rather than devices for moving the narrative forward? Also, what kind of research went into it to bring these characters to life aptly? My starting place for characters is always seeing them as real people. I'm interested in character-led fiction and so it would probably go against the impulses from where my imagination comes from to see them as devices for advancing plot. Often, the process of trying to ensure I make them well-rounded people begins with trying to think of what an average day looks like in their life, outside of the confines of my plot – what music do they listen to, how do they commute to work, what do they pack for lunch… The main character, Satnam and his journey, from disaffection to reluctant involvement, reflect a generational drift many readers may recognise if not relate deeply. What interested you most in exploring that tension between inherited memory and lived reality? And how consciously did you weave it into the novel's architecture? Like many characters in the novel, Satnam manages to find a stable identity by looking backwards rather than forwards. You're right to pull out that he's adrift in life, and he derives meaning from his family history and from a connection to their ancestral land. I hope there's space in the novel for this to be seen as both a good and a bad thing – we need origin stories to help tell us who we are, but they needn't wholly define us. The book layers modern India with future speculations and ancient myths. How do you see fiction's role in imagining timelines that don't sit comfortably within linear history, especially in a country like India, where the past is often politicised in the service of the present by everyone around? Sometimes I wonder if the reason we make art, whether that's fiction, music or film, is that these forms allow us to play with time in a way we can't in real life. In reality, time is a constant, but in a book, in a song, in a film, it's something we can speed up or slow down. I wanted to layer different timelines on top of one another in the novel, we get a present story that pushes forward into the future, we get a colonial-era story, and an ancient one, too. I was also interested in showing human stories against a backdrop of geological time – the timeline of a river is vastly different to that of a human life. Staying on the topic from before, your story weaves modern India with future speculation and ancient myth. What can fiction do with timelines that don't sit comfortably in linear history, especially in a country like ours where the past is constantly being repurposed for present-day politics? Linear history is a concept I found becoming more complicated as I worked on the book. For example, the characters in the late 19th century feel the effects of water scarcity, which is something that then returns on a larger scale in the imagined present. If you removed the dates from those historical chapters, one might be able to read them as set in a future after the events in the present day. And finally, what is your view on the idea of 'diaspora fiction' in the current literary landscape? Is it a label that still has any generative potential, or is it something a book like Saraswati ultimately tries to move beyond and break free? The diasporic element in the novel is one among many, and if readers find the book through it being part of that tradition, then I welcome it, but I can't say it was something I had in mind while writing. I do think there will long be generative potential in writing about migration – our common story, all the way back to the first people, is one of movement and change.
The Hindu
09-08-2025
- The Hindu
Ctrl+Alt+Cinema: Takopi's Original Sin and April
Whether you're an old hand at arthouse or just dipping a toe into the rising otaku subculture of anime aficionados around the world, this column lists curated titles that challenge, comfort, and occasionally combust your expectations. This week's picks for Ctrl+Alt+Cinema couldn't be more different on the surface — one's a six-episode anime about a pink alien octopus trying to spread joy, the other is a stark Georgian drama about a rural doctor under scrutiny for her role in a botched delivery — but both are crushing portraits of what happens when the structures meant to care for people fail them. From the drawing board Takopi's Original Sin sounds like the kind of show you'd expect to cheer you up after a long day. It's got a smiling alien octopus from Happy Planet, here to help a little girl with magical gadgets and good intentions. But before the end of the first episode, it's quite clear that this isn't that kind of story. The show follows the titular tentacled alien, whose naivety and earnestness bump up against a world far more complicated than it can afford to understand. Shizuka, the girl he wants to help, lives with a sadness that no gadget can erase, and Takopi will not stop at trying to make her smile once more. Streaming now on Crunchyroll and already breaking viewing records, Takopi is the surprise anime triumph of 2025. Adapted from Taizan 5's manga and helmed by Made in Abyss director Shinya Iino, this six-episode gem weaponises its cute camouflage, only to peel it back towards something deeply, disturbingly human. Like Hirokazu Kore-eda's Monster (2023), Takopi explores the ways children are shaped and sometimes shattered by the choices of adults. Fans of Wonder Egg Priority, BoJack Horseman, or even Requiem for a Dream will also feel right at home (or rather, right on edge). What makes Takopi remarkable is how deftly it binds character, form, and feeling. The gorgeous art shifts from childlike sketches and chiaroscuro dread, while the writing threads together multiple perspectives into a tightly wound gut-punch. If you've ever loved something like A Silent Voice, or found yourself undone by the emotional honesty of Look Back, this is the anime to sit with. Foreign affairs While most films about abortion tend to frame the issue as a binary of choice and consequence, Dea Kulumbegashvili's April is after the emotional weather of female agency under siege. It also begins with one of the creepiest, most unsettling opening shots you're likely to see this year. Currently streaming on MUBI, the film follows Nina, an obstetrician-gynecologist in rural Georgia, who performs abortions in secret and who comes under malpractice investigation after a botched delivery. Dea, whose 2020-film Beginning announced her as a major voice in Georgian cinema, now returns with greater maturity and restraint. It's a slow, unsettling portrait of a woman pushed to the edges and Dea's direction is exacting and spare. What makes April especially important right now is when and where it arrived. The film openly portrays abortion and the desperation of women seeking it, which is a rarity in Georgian cinema. Even though abortion is still legal in Georgia, the film has been inexplicably banned there, likely because it dares to speak openly about a subject that the majorly orthodox population still wants to keep hidden. It also comes at a time when reproductive rights are under a global siege, and sits with the weight of what it means to be a woman trying to make choices in a world that keeps trying to restrict them. If you appreciated the slow, painful revelations of Eliza Hittman's Never Rarely Sometimes Always or the moral complexity of Cristian Mungiu's 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, April belongs on your list. It's not easy to watch, but in this moment, few films feel more necessary. Ctrl+Alt+Cinema is a fortnightly column that brings you handpicked gems from the boundless offerings of world cinema and anime
Scroll.in
06-08-2025
- Scroll.in
‘Beginning' and ‘April' director interview: ‘I make films to grasp the true beauty of human nature'
Dea Kulumbegashvili is just two films old but already she has been added to the ranks of the most sensational directors in world cinema. The Georgian filmmaker's mastery in creating intense sensorial narratives that are felt as much as they are seen is evident in her feature debut Beginning (2020) as well as her second movie April (2024). Both films star Ia Sukhitashvili. Cinematographer Arseni Khachaturan has shot the movies on 35mm film stock, creating mesmerising visual landscapes that throb with colour, texture, light and feeling. In Beginning, Sukhitashvili plays Yana, the wife of a Jehovah's Witness preacher who is deeply affected when extremists torch the group's church. Yana's growing distance from her husband, her attitude towards their son, and her retreat into herself are portrayed through lengthy takes, several silences and startling ellipses. April is even more ambitious and transgressive than Beginning. The film follows Nina, an obstetrician who conducts illegal abortions, and who is accused of causing the death of one of her patients. An early graphic sequence of an actual birth is the first indication of April 's bold atmospherics. Nina's experience is interspersed with sightings of a spectral figure – a woman with a withered body and heavy breathing. Sound is as vital to Kulumbegashvili's rigorous formalism as the images, she told Scroll. Kulumbegashvili trained in filmmaking at the Columbia University School of the Arts. Before directing features, Kulumbegashvili made two well-received short films. The film company MUBI is showing Beginning and April on its streaming platform. Kulumbegashvili spoke to Scroll about her writing process, her philosophy behind the long take, and her equation with Arseni Khachaturan. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation. What is your writing process like? It's strange. I always call my writing process very messy. It's kind of like going in circles and detouring a lot because I hate to invent things, but I'm also very good at that sometimes. I want to be able to grasp what is real, and what is really happening in front of me. I am very curious to see small things, invisible tragedies almost. A very good friend once told me that unimportant things are really difficult to write about. I believe that. It's easy to create a three-act structure and grand narratives. There are people who do it really well, and it's not necessary for me to be part of that group. I can maybe do something that fewer people are interested in, which looks at more intimate, smaller things. How do you communicate your ideas to your producers? Reading the script is a different experience. There's a lot of struggle to keep the faith that what I wrote is going to be a film. When I give the script to producers, it's not immediately recognised as something that is happening. When I was making Beginning, I remember that not even one film institution outside of Georgia at that point gave us financing. We received many questions from established, renowned institutions that support art – what is this script about, what's happening in this script? Because it was believed that nothing is happening. I was asked to change the ending because there is no hope, I told that I need to show women in the places where there is oppression. That's something that really bothers me. I don't make films to put out a false idea of hope. I make films to grasp the true beauty of human nature, the tragedy. I believe in humans and humanism. I can't lie and look away when something is ugly or not pleasant to look at. Those things are usually in my script, and it's usually not easy to read. Beginning has a fantastic sequence of Ia Sukhitashvili lying on the ground for several minutes with her eyes closed. What was the starting point of that film, and of April? In Beginning, the first image I wrote was the final scene, when she sits at the table with her back to her husband, when she says I killed him [her son]. People asked me, doesn't she love him? Yes, she does, and that's the problem. Because if you don't love somebody, you just get up and leave, right? But this is more tragic for me. It's not that easy to just get out. It's easier maybe to detach somehow. But when love is involved, it's more painful. When I was writing April, there were these very tangible, physical experiences of Nina standing in a field. The wind hits her face and the wind is coming from flowers. I used to say, this is the sound of flowers in the wind. And everybody was like, what do you mean? It's just wind. I was really annoying people with that. I have so many hours of sound recorded for April. I was convinced that we needed to invent the entire method of vertically and horizontally separating the spaces and recording all of it. That's usually part of my writing process – what we hear is part of the narrative. Play What conversations do you have with Arseni Khachaturan, who has shot both your films? Right now, we're working on something. We are talking about a script that doesn't exist so far. I know how I want to shoot it and Arsene knows that it's in my head, but I'm not very coherent in this regard. The film we are working on has a really visual process. I have been telling him that I don't want the film to be glamorous, because this specific method [that she is pursuing] could be associated with glamorous. Can we go totally different? It irritates me, the perfection of the image that a technical approach allows. I just can't stand it. want to use it for seeing imperfections. He's like, okay. What is your dynamic with Khachaturan on the set? Sometimes I annoy Arseni because I like to use heavy cameras. It's important for me that the camera feels heavy. Of course, it's not good for Arseni because he operates the camera himself. But he understands why am I so convinced that I need to feel the breathing, the heavy movement. Arseni is very intuitive. He's a very sensitive person. For him, it's very important to be in sync with the actors because he needs to feel what's actually happening in front of the camera. We're always together on the set. We always stand together. It's never that I'm at the monitor and he's at the camera. It's important for me to whisper, somehow. I don't like to shout and scream on the set. It's a very intimate process. We need to see the film that's appearing in front of us. It's not just something we're creating. We need to see how it creates itself. What is your philosophy behind the long take? I never thought that I was making long takes. I'm able to do 11-minute takes because the film stock magazines are of this length. So I can't do it any longer – I would have if I could. Also, I cannot shoot on digital. It's important to accumulate cinema. It's an accumulative process. Sometimes I need more time for this to happen. Play
