April

Dea Kulumbegashvili's April premiered in competition at the 81st Venice Film Festival in September 2024, where the Isabelle Huppert-led jury awarded it the Special Jury Prize. It is the Georgian writer-director's second feature, after Beginning (2020) which took the top prize at San Sebastián, and a France-Italy-Georgia co-production with Luca Guadagnino's Frenesy Film and Memo Films. Metrograph Pictures acquired the film for North America after its festival run, opening it theatrically in spring 2025.

Ia Sukhitashvili (the lead of Beginning) returns as Nina, with Kakha Kintsurashvili as her former colleague David and Merab Ninidze (Jojo Rabbit, McMafia) as the chief physician. Cinematographer Arseni Khachaturan shoots in long static takes and at unusual heights, several scenes are entirely lit by hospital fluorescents or the yellow of country headlights, and the film's rare close-ups are matched by bursts of wordless landscape that Kulumbegashvili treats as something like the protagonist's interior weather.

Critics in Sight & Sound, Variety, The Hollywood Reporter and Cineuropa received the film as a major statement and a substantial leap in formal ambition over the already accomplished Beginning. It went on to win the Grand Prize at Tokyo FILMeX, the Zabaltegi-Tabakalera at San Sebastián, and the Asia Pacific Screen Awards for Best Film and Best Performance, and to feature on year-end lists of the most demanding and rewarding new arthouse cinema.