Taming the Garden (2021)
- Reviewed from the 2021 Sundance Film Festival.
There is a grand beauty to Taming the Garden, a meditative and loose film by Georgian filmmaker Salomé Jashi that depicts an anonymous, powerful man’s practice of uprooting century-old trees from coastal towns and transplanting them to his personal garden.
Jashi captures mesmerising footage of the trees being moved, but the general ambiguity and distance the film employs leaves a sense of coldness, of being kept at arm’s length. Its opaqueness hinders a greater understanding of the communities at odds with one another over the destruction of their environment.