Bod­ies, Babies and Birth Con­trol in April and All We Imag­ine as Light

There is a mon­ster lurk­ing on the edges of Dea Kulumbegashvili’s April. A half-mould­ed fig­ment with nei­ther eyes nor mouth hangs on the edges of the film’s ear­ly scenes, a har­bin­ger of ugly, impend­ing vio­lence. Such a mon­ster chan­nels the inex­press­ible anx­i­ety that sits trapped and scream­ing in our pro­tag­o­nist Nina’s (Ia Sukhi­tashvili) body. Her fear is a com­pli­cat­ed net­work of nerves and trig­gers, tug­ging on her organs, ren­der­ing her sense­less. Her fear is an unborn baby, bare­ly alive and yet threat­en­ing her exis­tence. In that first scene, we watch the crea­ture stalk across the screen, while the sound of children’s play echoes across the shiny black set. The fric­tion between the omi­nous image and the famil­iar sound is where the film lives, a cacoph­o­ny of con­flict­ing impuls­es; hor­ror next to joy, beau­ty next to mess, bloom­ing fields of flow­ers next to hous­es crammed with abuse.

April is the sec­ond of Kulumbegashvili’s fea­ture films. Both this and her first film, Begin­ning, are set in Geor­gia, qui­et­ly observ­ing a com­pli­cat­ed woman’s fraught life. While Begin­ning fol­lows Yana (also Ia Sukhi­tashvili), an actress turned mar­ried Jehovah’s Wit­ness mis­sion­ary and moth­er, April​’s Nina is sin­gle and free of chil­dren, and as such, her life is direct­ed by her work as an OB-GYN. Kulum­be­gashvili imme­di­ate­ly immers­es us in the rigours of her career, plung­ing us into the rough month she’s endur­ing at her hos­pi­tal, kicked off with the deliv­ery of a still­born baby. In its bloody wake, one irate father threat­ens to sue Nina for incom­pe­tence, inti­mat­ing that her prac­tice of ille­gal­ly admin­is­ter­ing abor­tions may reflect poor­ly on the final rul­ing. He spits in her face and she blinks back.

In Geor­gia, abor­tion is legal with­in the first 12 weeks of preg­nan­cy, but any health­care provider is allowed to deny such a request. Despite the legal­i­ty of its prac­tice, the major­i­ty of Geor­gians are not in favour of abor­tion, with a 2017 Pew Research Cen­ter report high­light­ing that only 10% of Geor­gians believe ​“abor­tion should be allowed in all or most cas­es”. Such behav­iour­al trends are hard to attribute to a sin­gle thing, but the preva­lence and pop­u­lar­i­ty of East­ern Ortho­dox Chris­tian­i­ty (with 83.4% of the pop­u­la­tion part of the church, accord­ing to the 2014 cen­sus) is no doubt a mean­ing­ful fac­tor. Besides Roma­nia and Arme­nia, Geor­gia had the high­est per­cent­age of devout respon­dents, who asso­ciate moral­i­ty exclu­sive­ly with Godliness.

Such a staunch­ly reli­gious world­view is an obsti­nate world­view, one that refus­es to bend in the blus­ter­ing winds of human expe­ri­ence. In both of Kulumbegashvili’s projects, the cam­era reflects this, remain­ing steady and unfal­ter­ing, intrigued but reserved. Late in the film, when Nina is forced to recre­ate the steps she took in the afore­men­tioned still­birth, Kulum­be­gashvili trains the cam­era on the back of her neck, an impas­sive stretch of blank skin beneath her blunt bob. It is an aston­ish­ing­ly sim­ple shot to the­mat­i­cal­ly pair with the grim footage of the real life birth that they are revis­it­ing, but both are inter­est­ed in the ways by which our bod­ies might uncon­scious­ly betray us, in life, in work, or in pregnancy.

Nina’s cold, cal­cu­lat­ed career is grant­ed some warmer tex­ture in a late char­ac­ter moment. Khadi­ja is a 16-year-old patient, mar­ried but des­per­ate to avoid get­ting preg­nant and scared to admit it. After a few cur­so­ry ques­tions, Nina ascer­tains the con­cern­ing shape of her new sex life (with an over-eager hus­band not keen to hear Khadija’s wor­ries) and curt­ly asks ​“Khadi­ja, do you want to be a moth­er? Real­ly?” She bare­ly responds before Nina rus­tles in a cab­i­net off­screen and then moves to sit beside her, prof­fer­ing birth con­trol. From the exam­i­na­tion table, to the doctor’s desk, the room is filled with shapes the two have made, pat­terns of trust for the cam­era to follow.

There’s a marked­ly sim­i­lar moment in the soft­er, more inti­mate All We Imag­ine as Light. Pay­al Kapadia’s sec­ond fea­ture length film fol­lows two women as they wade through rela­tion­al strife in Mum­bai all the while main­tain­ing their work in a bustling hos­pi­tal. Ear­ly on, there is a short scene where Añu (Divya Prab­ha), a rebel­lious trainee nurse, is sit­ting at recep­tion offer­ing con­tra­cep­tive advice to a young moth­er. The anony­mous moth­er is sad­dled with chil­dren who peer curi­ous­ly over the top of the counter. ​“How old are you?” Añu asks, slouched over a form. ​“24…no, no, 25,” the moth­er cor­rects her­self. She’s so young, and already so tired.

The cam­era then set­tles on Añu’s fea­tures, at first filled with eye-rolling dis­missal and then con­cerned enough to help stem the flow of chaos in this woman’s life. Añu grabs a pack of birth con­trol pills and slides them across the desk. ​“How much?” The moth­er inquires cau­tious­ly, Añu shrugs the ques­tion away. We will nev­er see that young moth­er again. Both All We Imag­ine as Light and April are about health­care, how mean­ing­ful it can be to have anoth­er per­son across from you, help­ing to keep you here and liv­ing, rather than just alive. These movies are intrigued with how nat­ur­al that impulse is, how hard it is to actu­alise, and the ten­sion therein.

In 2022, the US Supreme Court over­turned Roe vs. Wade, a 1973 rul­ing that ensured women had the right to seek out abor­tions in all 50 states. Since then, 19 states have banned abor­tion or offer only lim­it­ed access to the pro­ce­dure. With near imme­di­ate effect, hor­ror sto­ries of des­per­ate women seek­ing abor­tions rolled in, which has done noth­ing to sway the increas­ing­ly far-right polit­i­cal establishment.

After receiv­ing news that one of the young women Nina had per­formed mul­ti­ple abor­tions on has died (mur­dered by the woman’s own father who impreg­nat­ed her), Nina is then plunged into a meet­ing with the par­ents of that ear­ly still­born baby. Moth­er and father are perched on the sofa, while three doc­tors (Nina includ­ed) are arranged in an indis­cernible pat­tern across the room. The same supe­ri­or who con­front­ed Nina with the dev­as­tat­ing news moments before mus­es that ​“per­haps God sends us hard­ships so we learn how to over­come despair”. No one has any time to process this bland­ly philo­soph­i­cal state­ment – how it applies to each of them, both sep­a­rate­ly and togeth­er, before a bird careens into the win­dow and the screen cuts to black. Once again nature inter­rupts Kulumbegashvili’s film with its cool indif­fer­ence, pro­vid­ing a dra­mat­ic end to the con­ver­sa­tion and, in anoth­er sense, a way out of forcibly re-lit­i­gat­ing a past that can’t be changed. A hor­ri­ble path into the future.

In 2019, abor­tion was decrim­i­nalised across the north of Ire­land – where I’m from. Reli­gious fac­tions unit­ed in oppo­si­tion, assem­bling under the ban­ner March For Their Lives. Hav­ing grown up in the very same reli­gious, con­ser­v­a­tive cor­ners that clung to this pro-life stance, I saw dozens of posts from peo­ple there, flash­es of silent march­ing and raised torch­es across social media. It was frus­trat­ing and dis­ori­ent­ing to see so many peo­ple I knew con­gealed around the ban­ner read­ing ​“We were not asked. They can­not speak.”

Abor­tion access forces us to con­front why and how we hold one anoth­er back from lead­ing full, unen­cum­bered lives. When I hear that 2019, pro-life phrase now (“We were not asked. They can­not speak.”) I think of the young moth­er in All We Imag­ine as Light or Khadi­ja in April, women who seem bewil­dered by the cru­el shape their lives auto­mat­i­cal­ly seem to adopt. And I think of Nina and Añu, women who betrayed the sys­tems they’re part of to offer life-sav­ing, life-giv­ing help.