Screening

About The Machine Which Makes Everything Disappear

Year Released:

2013

Genres:

Documentary

Metadata:

Directed by Tinatin Gurchiani

Young adults, aged 15- to 23, are sought in a filmmaker’s casting call. The director wants to make a film about growing up in her home country, Georgia, and find commonalities across social and ethnic lines. She travels through cities and villages interviewing the candidates who responded and filming their daily lives.

The boys and girls who responded to the call are radically different from one another, as are their personal reasons for auditioning. Some want be movie stars and see the film as a means to that end; others want to tell their personal story. One girl wants to call to account the mother who abandoned her; one boy wants to share the experience of caring for his handicapped family members; another wants to clear the name of a brother, currently serving a jail sentence.

Together, their tales weave a kaleidoscopic tapestry of war and love, wealth and poverty, creating an extraordinarily complex vision of a modern society that still echoes with its Soviet past. In Georgian language with English subtitles. (2K DCP presentation)

“Director Tinatin Gurchiani opens a window into the lives of common folk in her native Georgia, where the post-Soviet era has been plagued by strife, using the premise of a bcasting call to pull confessions of hopesband dreams from her subjects.”
—Steve Dollar, The Wall Street Journal