The Machine Which Makes Everything Disappear

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A filmmaker puts out a casting call for young adults, aged 15- to 23. 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.

"10/10. The film is that rare thing, a genuine, affecting, and provocative surprise."—Cynthia Fuchs, PopMatters

"Mixing metanarrative with heightened visual aesthetics, THE MACHINE WHICH MAKES EVERYTHING DISAPPEAR intuitively penetrates individual lives to conjure a richly layered, indelible portrait of a society, brilliantly becoming more than the sum of its parts."—Sundance Film Festival

"Tinatin Gurchiani's accomplished first feature THE MACHINE WHICH MAKES EVERYTHING DISAPPEAR offers an impressionistic, somewhat poetical view of current life in her native former Soviet territory...ample human interest and handsome lensing."—Dennis Harvey, Variety

"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 casting call to pull confessions of hopes and dreams from her subjects."—Steve Dollar, The Wall Street Journal

"An offbeat, rewarding essay on diminished dreams…taps into universal concerns about family, separation and identity. There's a playful, spontaneous touch to these real world scenes [that] taken together, begin to acquire a cumulative power, suggesting the shared anxieties of all those in the throes of adolescence."—Tim Grierson, Screen Daily

"Provides an intimate and raw glimpse into the challenges faced by the young people of the former Soviet territory."—indieWIRE

"Communism's bleak coda...use[s] the camera as a social microscope, to celebrate the individual."—Ela Bittencourt, Artforum

"The interesting people, the steady images, and the amazing composition within many of the shots, are breathtaking for their simplicity and energy...bravely open."—Elias Savada, Film Threat

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Main credits

Gurchiani, Tinatin (film director)
Gurchiani, Tamar (film producer)

Other credits

Producer, Tamar Gurchiani; editor, Mari Kim; director of photography; Andreas Bergmann.

MARC Record See Worldcat record

Keywords

Georgia; Republic of Georgia; Tinatin Gurchiani; Tblisi; casting call; young adults; Central Asia; post-Soviet; "The Machine Which Makes Everything Disappear"; Icarus Films; "The Machine Which Makes Everything Disappear"; Icarus Films,doc,art; sociss