A fetal body barely moves on the water, with an uncertain step towards the darkness.

A live natural birth.

Rural area of Georgia

Nina works in a hospital; she is an experienced gynecologist, highly respected by her colleagues.

She also volunteers, for idealistic and humanitarian reasons, to perform clandestine abortions in a country where they are illegal. She is unconditionally dedicated to her patients, even if this means crossing legal or social boundaries. But after being accused of negligence following the death of a baby, she will have to consider the risks and her choices.

The baby died, she states, because the mother did not consent to a C-section. She also claims that the mother was calm and the child's death did not seem traumatic.

Static long takes on nature, rainy and gloomy landscapes, and colorful and comforting fields.

Nature is sometimes threatening, other times blooming and reassuring, alternating with her car rides, her occasional sexual encounters, and the worn, precarious, and mysterious female fetal being.

Clandestine abortions because there are women who cannot have children, who cannot afford the pill, who cannot say no…

Nina feels she has a role, a mission, and cannot give up despite risking a lot: her job and her reputation.

She tells a colleague an anecdote about how, sneaking to the lake with her sister, she couldn’t react and was frozen in place.

A sixteen-year-old Muslim girl visits, sent by her mother who doesn’t understand why her daughter isn’t getting pregnant: Nina's diagnosis is that the girl's body is not ready, and her psyche does not accept it, so she makes a secret pact with the young woman and devises a solution.

Nina knows very well that motherhood is not something natural at all, and becoming a mother is not always an aspiration.

She performs an abortion on a kitchen table, 15 minutes of a fixed long take: the deaf girl's sister does not understand who could have impregnated her; but it will be revealed who has been abusing her for years.

The storm returns, the mud, the fetal being wandering around her house.

The film begins with a natural birth and ends with a C-section with an epidural.

Questions raised by the film:

What is a natural birth, and what is an unnatural birth?

What is natural: wanting or not wanting a child, being able to decide whether to have a child or not; having a desired or undesired pregnancy; being abused and deciding to abort; being abused and not being able to decide to abort.

Nina embodies the mission, knowing she cannot have a life with someone, her sex is mostly occasional, found on the road, those roads she travels through the vast countryside outside Tbilisi.

Sometimes, nature looms threateningly, other times it is still beautiful and reassuring.

Breaths, moans, groans, wind, rain are the sounds of the film.

Water is everywhere: amniotic fluid can be very dangerous.

The being with the appearance of an aged fetus roams in dark places: perhaps it is the mystery of death meeting life, the mystery of a nature split and in conflict with its own “unnatural” condition.

Nina is a mythological figure, the goddess of childbirth, a contemporary Artemis, an emancipated and independent Amazon, though afflicted by the dichotomy and convergence between existence and femininity.

The blame for a pregnancy or an abortion is never the responsibility of the violent husband, the abusive brother-in-law, or the culture that tortures the female body, but the blame falls on the woman and on those who perform the termination of pregnancy because it is against the rules and laws.

Dea tears through the veil of darkness in which that fetal and mysterious woman roams.

Dea tears through the veil of darkness of the room full of “specialists” who leave the screening in droves, to avoid being disturbed, to avoid being prompted to reflect, to avoid investigating the mystery and condition represented, to erase any doubt and consideration, to return to their mindless comfort-zone.

Dea accompanies Nina on a journey in code that is not difficult to decipher, it just requires a bit of intellectual effort.

The feminine embodies Eros and Thanatos in its body-laboratory and in its psyche, disoriented and torn by all that potential and all that mortification.

The potential convergence and the radical conflict between existence and femininity are represented in an absolutely artistic and extremely disturbing way.

Dea undertakes an epic, enigmatic operation: the female anxiety will not receive catharsis, nature has been cruel, and only a new birth, a new dimension, another culture, and above all, another body could give her a different possibility of being.

The ontology of a mutilated, alienated, unrecognized femininity, which we should acknowledge.

05-Sep-2024 by Beatrice