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norahcampbell14
Reviews
Manqana, romelic kvelafers gaaqrobs (2012)
Elegiac beauty, exploitative screening.
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.