The Machine Which Makes Everything Disappear is an interesting premise for a documentary - placing advertisements in villages around Tbilisi, the director invites young people (15-23 year old) to 'audition' for a part in a film. From there, the camera follows the most promising life stories, and the viewer gains an intimate, involving insight into each person's unique pain - abandoned by a mother, a father going to hospital, and so on. The film is wonderfully shot - evoking the elegiac beauty of the gloomy countryside of Georgia. The film, like every documentary, is intensely exploitative. The young people appear on a stage almost as specimens. The false pretense of an audition to recruit the subjects is gradually excruciating, as they express their dreams of acting and moving away from their lives. I actually had the chance to attend a premiere of this film, where I asked the director if she had paid the participants - either during filming or retrospectively - but the answer was no. The film has been a massive financial success for the director, production house and distributor - so successful that it has been shown in 140 countries. The emotional and aesthetic labor of the young people - the entire film - is not recognized or rewarded in any way. A further exploitation, which is unique to the film, is that the subjects do not necessarily have enough understanding of what they are exposing to the world. For example, the camera follows a 15 year old girl to meet her mother who abandoned her when she was very young. The girl is distraught beyond words - but, one could argue that she is really not old enough to decide if she wants to screen this intensely, intimate vulnerable time in her life.

As someone who has lived in Georgia for over ten years, I approached this film with great interest. The premise is that the mostly-young participants will narrate their own stories, discuss their lives, hopes and dreams; however, the narrative is more shaped by manipulative editing and omissions than by its narrators. Georgia is shown as a mainly bleak rural landscape of unpaved roads lined with crumbling Soviet architecture, where the sky is always grey and raining. The narrators are filmed against the stark canvases of abandoned building interiors. Even when filming the capital of Tbilisi, the director chooses working-class suburbs, dark clubs and muddy streets under construction. Little context is given for the young narrators' lives. The interviewer often fails to ask obvious questions which would give perspective to their problems and ambitions. To what extent their situations are specifically Georgian or determined by their country's history and traditions is not always illustrated. The final interview, dubbed over images of the other participants, is more a rehearsed tirade to cement the director's pessimistic narrative than an honest summation of the views of the young people in the film. These elements combined paint an overly grey portrait, muting the colour of even the more hopeful interviewees, undermining their unique voices.

The Machine Which Makes Everything Disappear is truly a profound document of a specific time in the country of Georgia. Tinatin Gurchiani sets up a situation where people aged 15 through 25 (with some exceptions) arrive at a location to be part of this documentary, then she let's them talk and several times follows them back into their lives. There is no specific order to events. (This has bothered a few reviewers but not me.) This is certainly not a tourist documentary nor even a sociological examination. Yet I would also say that you can learn a great deal about Georgia by watching this film. But in reality her approach is poetic. She will just hold the camera still (occasionally I thought about Paradjanov or Tarkovsky) and simply show you a wall, a tree, a road, a village and most importantly faces. She made me want to travel to Georgia to know these truly human people in the midst of their difficulties.Tinatin Gurchiani has made a documentary that is not only about life in Georgia, about hopes and dreams and about the wall these aspirations run into, particularly in her country. Yet is ultimately about life itself. It is about the way we often simply find ourselves stalled, delayed, waiting, sometimes even crushed and yet we are still moving, still hoping, still searching for meaning.

Premiering at Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, Georgian documentary filmmaker Tinatin Gurchiani's The Machine Which Makes Everything Disappear seeks to give its predominantly Western audience a fleeting but poignant glimpse into the struggles of Georgian youth. While it doesn't always drive the point home with the sort of visceral, entirely emotive force one might hope for, it still makes for engaging and reflective viewing for anyone curious about the lives and cultures of secluded lands.The doco is sprawling and directionless, but not in an entirely negative way. Gurchiani places an ad seeking Georgian youth to play some sort of role in an upcoming film, but their 'audition process' is less dramatic readings or crying on cue and more a delicate process of teasing out the individual's personality and how it reflects all aspects of their life. This cast of characters includes an ambitious governor, a young boy fond of fairy tales and a curious soul searching for the mother who abandoned her, among others, and there is a sort of subtle poetry in the way Gurchiani's prodding and probing forms a backstory for these people about as well as any screenplay could.From there, the camera stays at arm's length as we follow this cast through a typical day in their life; punctuated by pleasantries but mostly riddled with a melancholy that seems crushingly appropriate amid the Georgian countryside's backdrop of browns and blacks. The emotional payoff depends entirely on whose story you're watching, as those whose stories look as if they may be the most intriguing (such as that of the capable yet unemployed online poker addict) are cut short, really before they even begin.As such, the film never feels in total control of the emotions it tries to draw from the viewer, but it remains a sharp exploration of humanity and core values sure to appease those looking for prototypical film festival fare. *There's nothing I love more than a bit of feedback, good or bad. So drop me a line on [email protected] and let me know what you thought of my review. If you're looking for a writer for your movie website or other publication, I'd also love to hear from you.*