City of the Sun
Chiatura, in western Georgia, once supplied nearly half of the world’s manganese, but today it resembles an apocalyptic ghost town. The film follows a few of its remaining inhabitants: Zurab, the music teacher, who dismantles concrete buildings and sells their iron girders to provide for his family; Archil, a miner whose real passion is amateur theatre; and two young, malnourished athletes stoically training for the next Olympic Games. Director Rati Oneli provides insight into a living environment whose bleak industrial ruins appear like a colossal film set; a city where electrical wires and aging cable cars flow like clogged arteries in an ailing organism. And yet, in a city where the sun never seems to shine, the inhabitants generate the most valuable of resources – humanity.