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Two of This Year’s Best NYFF Films Are About Having the Worst Week of Your Life
In Dea Kulumbegashvili’s April and Athina Rachel Tsangari’s Harvest, one bad week can upend a whole world.
Playing alongside Harvest in this year’s New York Film Festival is Dea Kulumbegashvili’s April, a Vera Drake– style story for modern times about an OB/GYN named Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili) in Eastern Georgia who divides her time between the sterile, imposing wings of her hospital workplace, where she is under investigation after a birth goes wrong, and the grassy wild of the mountain villages, where she travels to perform illegal abortions for those who need them. While his nameless village feels as though it’s been around as long as time itself — their feudal lord, Master Kent (Harry Melling), is not so much “in charge” as he is “just around” — the encroaching corporate(-ish) takeover they face threatens their way of life entirely. Their routines have long endured on the fringes of their worlds, with Nina driving back and forth from her plain, modern life and the wilds of the mountain villages and Walter’s sometimes agrarian, sometimes intellectual upbringing.
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