Winner of the Directing Award: World Cinema Documentary at Sundance 2013, The Machine That Makes Things Disappear came to Hotdocs13 highly recommended. It is now winner of the Hotdocs13 Festival Winner of the Audience Award along with Muscle Shoals. Filmmaker Tinatin Gurchiani recorded interviews with a variety of subjects; people at different stages of their life, a woman about to get married, an old romantic trying to support his elderly mother. The interviews, conducted between October and November 2011, in Georgia, a former Soviet state and participant in the South Ossetia War of 2008, are framed as interviews that explore particular snapshots of the subject’s life. Through these snapshots we are intimately introduced to the personal experiences of these people and appreciate their lives, its challenges and rewards from their perspective. This is a film about family, responsibility and choice. Interviews are broken up with footage of everyday life, including a wedding, road maintenance and visiting family. One man must choose between his own future and that of the people he is looking after, another talks about her suicidal depression, someone else tells us about how having a child forced her to re-evaluate her life and yet another shares his escape from war at the age of seven. It’s an interesting cross-section of society, presented from with a variety of different realities that characterize the subjects. Some come hoping for fame, others come just to tell their stories. This is a country that lives and breathes, despite the poverty and numerous other problems.

Photo courtesy of HotDocs.

There’s a rawness and tenderness throughout the movie. The director’s detachment from the stories allows the speakers to share their thoughts without being led, and lets us really see what makes them tick. When we’re allowed to see their lives, such as the man delivering letters written by his imprisoned brother or a man who must choose between his own happiness and the happiness of others, we see a very intimate portrait of these people, not facts and figures or second hand stories, but people struggling to find their way in a country that is largely unknown.

Donal O’Connor