The Dazzling Light of Sunset

Best First Film - Visions du Réel
Best Feature - FIC Valdivia
Best Documentary Award - Astra FF
Best Documentary, Best Debut Film - Jihlava IDFF
Best Film - ZagrebDox 

Official Selection – Sarajevo Film Festival
Art of the Real - Lincoln Center, New York

"Beautifully shot and strangely comic. Through subtle editing choices, Jashi suggests that nothing truly changes in this former Soviet satellite—but allows her subjects to have one last acerbic word on the matter of representation." - Film Society of Lincoln Center  

In this idiosyncratic, award-winning documentary, the peripherality of local television is in focus.  Following a lone reporter in a provincial station in post-Soviet Georgia, it artfully reveals a tragi-comic account of the town's prime chronicler, subject to the whims and particularities of her community in transition.  

Flanked by her phlegmatic sidekick Kakha, Dariko is the only outside broadcast journalist at a local Georgian television channel.  With derisory resources, she races from one report to another to provide an honest, if not objective, image of the current events that shape her environment: from the capture of a “giant” owl, to the death of a local hero, a beauty pageant, and the approaching elections.  While receiving vague threats from politicians to coerce favorable coverage, and criticism from the community for not covering its corruption enough, Dariko and Kakha find themselves increasingly distracted with finding the funding to stay in operation at all.  Still, through their televised tapestry of stories, often rendered with a flair for the absurd, an ethos to responsibly represent life in their community shines through.

The Dazzling Light of Sunset provides, with humor, distance and a consummate sense of framing, a pseudo-ethnographic portrait of a community forming an image of itself.  It turns the micro-events that punctuate the story into revealing examples of a country still in the chaotic process of transition.

74 minutes, in Georgian with English subtitles.

Directed by Salomé Jashi

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