Taming the Garden

The opening shot of this striking environmental tale captures a tree as tall as a 15-story building floating on a barge across the vast Black Sea. Its destination is a garden many miles away, privately owned by an anonymous wealthy man whose passion is transplanting foreign trees into his own personal man-made Eden.

With astonishing cinematic style, Taming the Garden tracks the surreal uprooting of ancient trees from their Georgian locales. With each removal, tensions flare between workers and villagers. Some see financial incentive—new roads, handsome fees—while others angrily mourn the loss of what was assumed an immovable monolith of their town’s collective history and memory.

With a steady and shrewdly observant eye, Jashi documents a single man’s power over Earth’s natural gardens: how majestic living artifacts of a country’s identity can so effortlessly become uprooted by individuals with no connection to the nature they now claim as their own.

“Surreal, serene and maybe just a little bit sacred.” (Variety)“

[An] extraordinary, savagely poetic film.” (Observer)

more info at this website: bigworldpictures.org/films/tamingthegarden/index.html

Ithaca Premiere
In Georgian with English subtitles