Salomé Jashi | Taming the Garden

TAMING THE GARDEN

მოთვინიერება

91' 2021

www.tamingthegarden-film.com

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, privately owned by a wealthy and anonymous man whose passion resides in the removal, and subsequent replanting, of foreign trees into his own 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 incentives—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.

- Sundance Film Festival

A film by Salomé Jashi

Cinematographers Goga Devdariani, Salomé Jashi

Editor Chris Wright

Sound recordists Nino Tevdorashvili,

Ana Davitashvili, Tengo Mandzulashvili

Sound designer Philippe Ciompi

Music supervisor Celia Stroom

Researcher Tamara Mshvenieradze

Produced by Vadim Jendreyko, Erik Winker, Martin Roelly, Salomé Jashi

Mira Film, CORSO Film, Sakdoc Film

World Sales

Syndicado Film Sales

Aleksandar Govedarica

aleksandar@syndicado.com

https://syndicadofs.com/

+421949635890

Support
Federal Office for Culture Switzerland,

Film und Medien Stiftung NRW,

Eurimages, Basel Film Fund, IDFA Bertha Fund,

Georgian National Film Center, Robert Bosch Stiftung

/ Literatisches Colloquim Berlin LCB,

Nipkow Program, DAAD Artists-in-Berlin,

HEAD post production award

In collaboration with broadcasters

SRF / SRG SSR, Radio Bremen, Arte, Yle

Distribution support

Swiss Films

Selected snippets from reviews

"Quietly magnificent and strange" - Jessica Kiang, Variety

"No film has lingered in my memory longer than Salomé Jashi’s deceptively simple spare look at both the physical process of moving this massive living thing and the conflict it engenders among a village’s locals. Not just because the images, starting with that opening shot of something that immediately feels both beautiful and wrong, are breathtaking. It lays out a complicated argument about ecology, economics, compromise, class, and humanity’s need to conquer and/or “tame” nature without resorting to an attack via polemics." - David Fear, Rolling Stone

"A film where the offbeat subject matter and striking imagery make an entrancing combination" - Screen Daily

"With its static long takes and slow-moving points-of-focus, Taming the Garden is full of evocative imagery." – Sandi Rankaduwa, POV

“Taming the Garden” [has] stuck with me the most out of the docs I absorbed at Sundance... I’m already looking forward to falling under the strange spell of “Taming the Garden” once again; it’s a documentary worthy of IMAX…" - Kens5