Film screening of Taming the Garden (2021)

Taming the Garden (2021) of Salomé Jashi opens with a shot of fishermen observing a cargo ship transporting an enormous tree along the coast of Black sea. The tree is headed towards a private botanical garden created and financed by a billionaire and former prime minister of Georgia. The pace of the ship, as well as the pace of the whole film, is slow, almost glacial. It echoes the imperceptible, yet unrelenting, pace of changes resulting from the damage done to the landscape from which the tree has been uprooted, and to the people living in this landscape. The private garden to which the tree is heading to is almost of a mythical nature hinting at many stories revolving around the disdainful creation of a personal Garden of Eden at the expense of the universal Garden of Earth. Borrowing the title of Statues Also Die (1953), we can say that, devoid of its context and set in a different land, Trees Also Die.