Taming The Garden

The opening shot of filmmaker Salomé Jashi’s striking environmental tale captures a tree as tall as a 15-story building floating on a barge across the vast Black Sea. Its destination lies within a garden countless miles away. Cryptically, elliptically, without narration or any outside intervention, Taming the Garden relates a curious recent incident in rural Georgia when the billionaire ex-prime minister — still widely regarded as among the most powerful men in the country — decided to populate his vast private estate with mature trees. An observational documentary that explores themes of commercial worth and societal value, Jashi’s film plays more like myth than journalism, as though she is documenting the folklore of the future as it is happening. We are witness to the arguments pro and con among the villagers, but even when the locals don’t acknowledge it, Jashi’s watchful, listening film is tuned to the wavelength of their collective, subconscious regret. Whatever they might say, there’s an understanding that to hack into those 15-meter-wide root systems is to tear into the very fabric of the community. ~excerpts from Jessica Chang, Variety