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Today’s trailer for a Sundance 2013 selection offers a very intriguing look at… well, it’s difficult to tell from the video alone. Even though there are words spoken and there are titles stating that “people come to share their stories” … “at the turning point in their lives,” there’s not a lot to go on. But the images of a foreign place and culture, the mix of landscape and portrait, action and still life, crying and confessing, and certainly the dramatic score from Louis Malle’s Damages makes The Machine Which Makes Everything Disappear a curiosity that I’m anxious to see more of.

This feature documentary, the debut of Tinatin Gurchiani, is a look at life in Georgia — the nation, not the state — based around stories told directly to the camera by youths who answered a fiction film casting call. The Sundance guide, which refers to it as “Altman-esque,” has more specifics on some of the things we see on screen. For even more, including details on some of the main subjects, visit Dok.Incubator. In this long synopsis, written by Gurchiani, he explains the primary point of the doc:

there are no documentaries about the young generation of Georgians: there are no lively, authentic film characters that would tell us about their dramatic life stories. I want to fill this gap and empower the youth to give them a chance to share their stories with each other and the general public in an emotional and subjective way. This is especially important for a society which is preoccupied with idealising the past without conducting its in-depth analysis and reflecting about the present.

The Machine Which Makes Everything Disappear has already screened at DOK Leipzig and IDFA and will make its first appearance at Sundance on January 18.