Documentaries, in my not so humble opinion, are made to manipulate the facts at hand in order to make a statement and convince an audience of something. They are almost never didactic, but on occasion there comes a piece in which a person picks up a camera, points and shoots. I am not going to say that this little piece from Georgia is completely impartial and fully didactic--after all, what goes unsaid is as important as what is--but it does come startlingly close to leaving the filmmaker at the door and just showing the subject matter.
The premise is simple but wonderfully clever: a director goes to Georgia (the country, not the state), hangs posters around a little town saying that she is auditioning people between the ages of 15-25 for a film about the youth of the area. The teens and young adults come in to audition and instead are subtly coerced into telling the camera about the lives, their hopes and wishes, the pain that they have suffered, and in this way the audience gets tiny glimpses of a backward place that is off the grid to most people.
In total there were probably something like a dozen stories covering people from the age of 13 to one man in his late-50s. Director Tinatin Gurchiani has done a wonderfully thorough job of finding and editing stories from all walks of life of people in the area, and capturing a variety of topics. We have clips ranging from a marriage of a very young girl, to a man trying to rekindle the passion between his imprisoned brother and his one-time love affair, a young lad describing his experience in war as a child, to a new mother to an online-gambling addict.
Through all of these there are four which we spend an extra length of time exploring, brought out of the auditioning room and into the fields and valleys of a land which looks as though it is stuck three hundred years in the past:
One I have mentioned, the brother transporting letters from his convict sibling to his lover which I found to be the least interesting of the stories, though we do get some insight into the conservatism of the Georgian youth. There is also the story of the 13-year-old boy, who frets in his house with his family after his father goes to the city to have an operation. Then there is the life of the 25-year-old mayor of a town of 150, in which the average age is 70. Finally we have a heart breaking look at a young girl who seeks her mother who abandoned her as a child.
In all that we see there is not much to find redeeming about the place we see. From their stories there were two ideas that stuck out to me: There was a scene captured in the story of the mayor in which one alcoholic man chops down a dead tree. He muses to himself, "what good is a dead tree?" The second came from a startlingly articulate young female writer, tattooed and angry with the world. She pontificates that if she had a machine which could make anything disappear she would erase herself.
These thoughts struck me as being poignant to what the audience was watching on the screen. This is a hopeless place where people are born, they live their subsistence lifestyle or if they are lucky go to school and get a trade job, and they die. It is a tired place and a useless place. I think that the director in presenting her homeland wanted to offer something more than that, but I feel that all she succeeded in doing was depressing the audience by showing the futility of their lives. It is a tired place, and a dying place. Their communal spirit and their love of the family cannot hide the very realness that maybe that machine would have too much to erase in the case of that nation.
3/4
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