The Machine Which Makes Everything Disappear

Director: Tinatin Gurchiani
Screenwriters: Tinatin Gurchiani

Institute History

  • 2013 Sundance Film Festival

Description

The story begins with an experiment. A filmmaker in the country of Georgia posts an ad inviting youth to audition for her film. Facing the camera, the hopefuls confess their struggles and dreams. These raw interviews unfold seamlessly into cinematic slivers of Georgian life. A teenager awaits news of his father’s surgery. A girl anticipates her wedding. The governor of a tiny village faces a monumental decision. A soldier attempts to link his imprisoned brother to the world outside, and a young woman confronts the mother who abandoned her. These threads form a fluid Altman-esque collage of characters—and a nation—teetering on the brink of change. It’s a world where tradition and modernity subtly intermingle: singing traditional ballads is as common a self-expression as listening to hip-hop or playing online poker.

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.

— C. L.

Screening Details

Sundance Film Festival Awards

As you use our Online Archives, please understand that the information presented from Festivals, Labs, and other activities is taken directly from official publications from each year. While this information is limited and doesn't necessarily represent the full list of participants (e.g. actors and crew), it is the list given to us by the main film/play/project contact at the time, based on the space restrictions of our publications. Each entry in the Online Archives is meant as a historical record of a particular film, play, or project at the time of its involvement with Sundance Institute. For this reason, we can only amend an entry if a name is misspelled, or if the entry does not correctly reflect the original publication. If you have questions or comments, please email [email protected]