Dea Kulumbegashvili’s first feature film is difficult to watch, but even harder to turn away from. Beginning is now screening at the 2021 Jerusalem Film Festival.
From August 24th to September 4th, the Jerusalem Film Festival is presenting an impressive selection of titles, who have been successful on the film festival circuit, including The Worst Person In The World (Joachim Trier), The Braves (Anaïs Volpé), The Divide (Catherine Corsini), or Zero Fucks Given (Emmanuel Marre, Julie Lecoustre), to name but a few. Among them is Beginning, Dea Kulumbegashvili’s debut feature, which previously screened at Toronto International Film Festival 2020, at Cannes 2020, won the Golden Shell for Best Film at San Sebastian Film Festival 2020, and is currently screening in Jerusalem Film Festival’s Debut section.
Beginning recounts a brief time period of just a few days in the life of Yana (Ia Sukhitashvili), a woman living in a Jehovah’s Witness community in a small town in Georgia, where the orthodox Christian majority consider this community inferior. Having surrendered her career as an actress, Yana is married to the community’s religious leader, David (Rati Oneli), and together they have a young son, Giorgio (Saba Gogichaishvili), who is preparing for his baptism.
We meet Yana in the town’s prayer hall, appearing as a dutiful albeit subservient partner to David as she greets congregants by his side for their weekly worship. David’s sermon discusses the moral dilemma faced by Abraham when asked by God to sacrifice his son, when Molotov cocktails are thrown into the prayer hall by orthodox extremists. Naturally, chaos ensues as the worshippers escape a building that soon burns to the ground. With David off in Tbilisi securing funds to rebuild, Yana gets the alone time she said she desperately needed, explaining to her husband, indifferent to her deep and evident unhappiness, “I want to be alone… I can’t go on like this. Life goes by as if I weren’t there.”
What follows is a slow unraveling of Yana’s emotional and spiritual state. She can no longer bear her reality. A series of events – most horrifically, a brutal rape – push an already suffering woman to her edge, far enough to commit a shocking and unimaginable act in a matter-of-fact approach. To watch this unfold over two hours is at once both profoundly upsetting, literally breathtaking, and, in some small ways, meditative, even hypnotizing. The slow pacing brings one to the edge of their seat, waiting for the next moment quietly teeming with emotion.
With minimal dialogue and sparse emotional expression, Sukhitashvili conveys Yana’s undoing extraordinarily. Through this minimalism, Yana’s pain is not seen but felt, and certainly not in a cathartic manner.
Using long and static shots, filmed nostalgically in 35 mm with a 4:3 ratio, we, as the audience, see just what we need to and nothing more. With dialogue or action often taking place out of frame, our attention is better placed elsewhere, whether in a reaction to what is said offscreen or to view the perspective of a character, rather than the character themself.
The beautifully shot visuals are combined with an audio track composed solely of natural sound – spoken voices, birds chirping, fire burning, Yana’s sighs of exhaustion, car tires over gravel, baptismal water submersion. Every sound penetrates the weighty silence like a knife through the heart, each a product of great intentionality. This intentionality is seen in every aesthetic choice Kulumbegashvili has made; there is neither room, time, nor reason for the superfluous. Beginning ends in exactly this unembellished fashion. Diverging from its previously realistic plotline, the final scene shows the body of Alex (Kakha Kintsurashvili), Yana’s rapist, turn to stone, then dust, then disappear entirely. A force of evil within the film turns to nothing.
This is a film that requires patience, but one that is mightily deserving of it. It is a story of womanhood within the story of one woman and how women exist and survive, even just barely, in realities built by and for men. “I firmly believe that in a so-called traditional narrative Yana would be relegated to a supporting character,” explained Kulumbegashvili. “The fabric of the film resembles the Fall from Paradise, the fall from grace. Eve recognized the limits of Paradise and took a step into the unknown. Yana does the same thing.” As Yana ventures out far beyond the norm of her life, I am not sure whether we leave this woman – a shell of her former self – at her beginning, her end, or rather the beginning of her end.
