Online screening + discussion: Sunny

Georgia, once known as the Sunshine State, is facing a major exodus of its residents to more developed countries in the West. Faced with cultural, economic and political challenges, door-to-door sociological researcher Sunny travels the streets of Tbilisi to confidentially interview a section of Georgian society. This stylistically distinctive yet minimalist observational documentary captures Georgian culture from multiple levels, in which the facial expressions, behaviors and responses of individuals, along with the architecture of the environment they inhabit, are transformed into an authentically honest voice of a society universal to all post-Soviet countries.

Keti Machavariani graduated from Tbilisi State University's faculty of Art and State University of Film and Theatre's faculty of Cinema. Between 2005 and 2006 she undertook a practical course with the Italian State television broadcaster RAI. Keti has directed several short films, worked as a director and producer of television programmes. Keti worked on Levan Koguahsvili's award winning films - Blind Dates and Street Days as a line producer. Her debut feature film “Salt White” premiered at Karlovy Vary Film Festival. The film has been shown at more than 30 festivals and won several awards. Keti’s recent documentary film  Mziuri ( Sunny)  has been shown at Hot Doc Film Festival and received jury honourable mention. Currently Keti is working on the feature film project “Lullaby”. In 2021 the project won Best project award (Tbilisi International Film Festival). The project was selected for the industrial platforms of Cinemed (Montpelier International Film Festival) and Agora Meetings (Thessaloniki International Film Festival).

Tsisana Khundadze’s educational background is in psychology, she holds Bachelor’s degree in social sciences, Master’s degree in psychology and PhD in Social, political and cultural psychology. Her professional experience is mainly related to social research. Developing the idea of a documentary about the interviewer’s job in social research was Tsisana's first step in the film-making industry. She has taken and successfully completed the practical course of audio-visual storytelling at CTC (Consulting and Training Center) in 2018. In 2018 Tsisana together with Georgian director Ketevan Machavariani won the main award at the Civil Pitch competition at CineDOC Tbilisi 2018 for the project “Sunny'' and started the journey in the industry together with the film.

Nino Orjonikidze is a Georgian documentary filmmaker, author of several award winning films including A Tunnel, English Teacher and Altzaney. After teaching Documentary film at the Caucasus School of Journalism and Media Management in GIPA for the last 10 years and curating short documentary film production at Chai Khana Media platform for the last 8 years, Nino is well acquainted with the South Caucasus documentary film scene. Herself an alumni of many interesting training programs including EsoDoc, she is now tutoring internationally, be it international exchange academic programs or training initiatives. Nino runs a production company Artefact Production she established 15 years ago after quitting the TV journalism path and moving into creative documentary film production. She studied TV Journalism and documentary film at Goldsmiths, University of London (MA), Journalism and cinema studies at Tbilisi State University (BA).