Review | Taming the Garden — an insightful documentary on power and vanity in Georgia

★★★★☆

Salomé Jashi’s cautionary tale on power, vanity, and uprooted trees feels more prescient than ever.

Georgians have seen the headlines: Georgian Dream founder and the country’s richest man Bidzina Ivanishvili commissioned transplanting ancient trees — some as tall as 15 storeys — from across the country to plant in his private seaside garden. We’ve witnessed the surreal images: hundred-year-old giants gliding across the Black Sea. But Taming the Garden, Salomé Jashi’s haunting 2021 documentary, offers a closer, more intimate look at this extraordinary process, one that profoundly affects the viewer.

The film opens with a striking image: a huge tree floating on a barge along Georgia’s Black Sea coast. Jashi’s camera (operated by herself and cinematographer Goga Devdarian) serves as a silent observer, At times, it nestles close to the machines — cranes, drills, and excavators — as they tear into ancient roots. Other times, it withdraws, offering wide shots of Edenic landscapes slowly giving way to mechanical desecration. The sound design (Philippe Ciompi) deserves special praise: industrial roars, the soft rush of the sea, murmurs of displaced villagers and weary workers, breaking branches are all layered and textured into something unsettling.

Jashi captures the immense, almost absurd logistics involved in uprooting and relocating these trees, including focusing on the poor and nearly abandoned Georgian villages where the roads were paved not for people, but for the passage of a billionaire’s whims. With the film’s final shots, the Shekvetili Dendrological Park, Ivanishvili’s private garden, becomes a symbol of power and control, where nature is curated and commodified.

One of the most memorable sequences in Taming the Garden features villagers silently trailing a truck carrying away what they call the ‘beauty of their village"’ —a centuries-old tree destined for a faraway garden. The scene is intimate, eerily reminiscent of a western Georgian funeral procession: sobbing, averted gazes, the twitchy ritual of nervous cigarette smoking. Saying goodbye to a tree, here, becomes an act of collective mourning.

The film doesn’t present Ivanishvili directly; he remains an unseen force, his influence felt in every uprooted tree and altered landscape. Jashi, who is an experienced journalist, refrains from overt commentary and lengthy dialogues, allowing visuals and sounds to speak instead.

Following its Georgian premiere at the Tbilisi International Film Festival in December 2021, the Georgian Film Academy abruptly cancelled all further screenings, citing concerns that the film would ‘divide public opinion’. Branded too political for mainstream cinemas, Taming the Garden found its audience through grassroots screenings in cafés and civil society-organised gatherings.

Now, four years later, the film’s relevance has only intensified. In an era marked by broligarchy, environmental crises, eccentric billionaires, and generative AI, Jashi’s film reads like a cautionary tale: a quiet but potent warning about the asymmetry of power, about technology as an accomplice in the hands of the ultra-rich, and about what is lost when nature is treated as something ornamental — something to be moved, shaped, or erased.

For many Georgians, the surreal journey of the uprooted trees feels painfully relatable. Amid ongoing mass protests against a repressive government and growing democratic backsliding, Ivanishvili’s grip on power has become ever more tangible. Just as he transplants ancient trees for his private garden, many Georgians feel they too are being displaced — politically, economically, and emotionally — by a system designed to serve the whims of one man. With emigration on the rise, civic voices increasingly silenced, and state institutions bent to oligarchic will, the entire country can feel like Ivanishvili’s personal garden: curated, controlled, and hollowed out.

Film details: Taming the Garden (2021) directed by Salomé Jashi. Available to watch on Apple TV, Kanopy, and Vimeo.

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