The Machine Which Makes Everything Disappear
It is quite a daring storytelling format that Georgian Tinatin Gurchiani has chosen for her first feature length documentary. She has invited (mostly) young people, some of them kids, for a film casting, where she from behind the camera asks them questions about their lives, a rather direct and personal approach that leads to sequences, where you go with them to their homes or with them on missions in life, or you are taken on some visual tours into beautiful and fascinating Georgia.
Daring because you introduce some characters, make us viewers curious to have more, to go deeper, and then you leave them again. It is sometimes irritating with too brief encounters. The casting, however, the variety of characters in age and background, makes one happy at the end of the film – yes, we were given a mosaic picture, the director’s pov, of her country, told through some of its citizens, in a respectful, melancholic tone with an amazing cinematographic work on Georgian landscapes. The two fairy tale linked stories – the boy in the beginning of the film who loves Little Red Riding Hood, and the young woman at the end of the film who feels like a Cinderella – are those of the stories that come out best, the latter in an extremely dramatic way, whereas a story of a brother to a prisoner leaves you a bit ”who cares”. There is a lot of pain in this original film that also has references to the conflicts and wars with Abkhazia and Russia. Again, it was pleasant to watch, with a charming hybrid docu-fiction style.
Georgia, 2012, 97 mins.
