City of the Sun (2017)

Chiatura, a mining town in western Georgia, was once one of the most industrially significant places on earth. At its peak, the region supplied close to half of the world's manganese, a metal used in steel production and countless industrial processes. That era is long gone. What remains is something closer to a slow fade: crumbling Soviet-era infrastructure, a population that has largely moved on, and a handful of people who, for one reason or another, have stayed. It is this specific, quiet human residue that City of the Sun (the Georgian title is Mzis Qalaqi) chooses to put on screen. The film had its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in 2017, where it screened in the World Cinema Documentary Competition, and it went on to represent Georgia as its submission for consideration at the Academy Awards that year. For anyone interested in how post-Soviet spaces look and feel a generation on from the USSR's collapse, Chiatura is an unusually vivid case study.

The film is the debut feature of Georgian-born director Rati Oneli, who co-produced the project through a genuinely international funding arrangement spanning Qatar, Georgia, the United States and the Netherlands, with Office of Film Architecture serving as the producing company. Oneli worked as a cinematographer and editor across various projects before turning to directing, and that background is fairly evident in the finished film. Rather than building a conventional documentary around interviews, narration or archival footage, he chose an observational approach, following a small number of residents through their daily routines. There is a music teacher who supplements whatever income he has by dismantling derelict concrete buildings and selling the salvaged iron girders. There is a miner whose other life involves the local amateur theatre group. There are two young female athletes, visibly underfed, who continue training regardless, with the Olympic Games somewhere in mind. Nobody explains themselves to the camera. The film simply watches. It sits comfortably alongside other recent documentaries produced with Qatari involvement, such as Talking About Trees (2019) and Tiger Stripes (2023), in its preference for letting situations speak without intervention.

In terms of cast, there are no named performers in the conventional sense. The individuals on screen are residents of Chiatura appearing, as far as is known, as themselves. What they bring, almost by accident, is a kind of worn dignity that is difficult to manufacture. The film is polished but unhurried, and its reputation rests almost entirely on the quality of its imagery and the lives it chooses to observe rather than any formal narrative structure. Viewers coming to it expecting a history lesson or a polemical argument about economic decline will need to recalibrate their expectations fairly quickly. For those curious how this sits alongside other documentary work reviewed here, it is worth comparing it with something like Nom Tèw (2009) or Ben Fogle and the Buried City (2023), both of which approach marginalised or forgotten places through rather different documentary lenses.

A-Z World Movie Tour Georgia This is a beautifully shot documentary set in a small Georgian town from the perspective of a few individuals. It's very minimalistic so don't prepare to learn anything. It's extremely artistic in nature and that's it's only plus side really. The shots are incredible. It does get boring rather fast tho as it's just visual. Some of the shots of the man pulling apart a building are terrifying considering he's not using a harness. Its so dangerous.

I think that tension between the visual ambition and the lack of any real informational throughline is what stays with me most. There is genuine craft here, and some of those images, particularly the sequences with the building being taken apart piece by piece with no apparent concern for basic safety, are the sort of thing you do not forget in a hurry. But craft alone only carries a film so far when there is nothing else pulling you forward. For a debut feature it is a confident statement of intent from Oneli, and Chiatura itself is a genuinely haunting subject. It just needed something more to hold on to beyond the beauty of the frame. A stunning postcard from a forgotten corner of the world, then, but one you have probably finished looking at before it has finished showing itself to you.

Rating: ★★  | Year: 2017  | Watched: 2025-06-22

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Trailer

▶ Watch the official trailer for City of the Sun (2017) on YouTube

Where to watch

Watch in the UK
Stream: Netflix · True Story · DocAlliance Films · Netflix Standard with Ads
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi

Watch in the US
Stream: OVID · True Story
Physical: Amazon US

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