Taming the garden

REVIEW

A powerful magnate, and former prime minister of his country, has a peculiar hobby: he has decided to collect trees and that is why he transplants them from the original soils in which they grew to his private park on the Georgian coast.

That man never appears in Salomé Jashi’s film but inhabits it with an intimidating absence. Its presence is latent and oppressive. This has a lot to do with the surreal principle from which the documentary starts, but especially with the way the director films and lives the pace of shooting. Taming the Garden is a slow and contemplative film, the product of two years of shooting, in which each situation expands like the roots of so many species of trees that now float between the waters that link the Caspian Sea and the Black Sea until reaching their new destination.

There is something unique about the representation of space and the beings that inhabit it. While it is true that peculiar Caucasian spirit nourishes the film with absolute singularity, Jashi does not stop questioning increasingly global concepts. We live in times where even the most capricious wishes can be realized at the cost of exploitation, extortion and degradation of the dignity of others. It is not just a matter of extracting trees from their original soils, hoarding oxygen, modifying landscapes. The image of those violently uprooted roots indicates to us what power is capable of and the result cannot but awaken, not only in those involved but also in the spectators, a feeling of mourning, desolation and emptiness.

Jashi’s camera observes the details in a masterful and precise way and grants a wonderful corporality both to the trees that are beautiful and photogenic beings in themselves, as well as to the machinery used in the engineering processes necessary for each removal. Formally impeccable, Taming the Garden is a film very respectful of its own method, faithful to its concept and highly political; a work that mesmerizes by its rhythm, its sounds and its long times.

María Campaña Ramia
MajorDocs Programming Team