Taming the Garden / Film School Radio interview with Director Salomé Jashi

From the opening shot of this striking environmental tale, TAMING THE GARDEN, captures a otherworldly vibe, embodied by 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. Director Salomé Jashi stops by to talk about the clash of immense wealth and political power and a rural, farming community with neither. The meditative tone of TAMING THE GARDEN allows the audience to reconcile the contrasting the people’s relationship with the powerful political class that has held sway over them for centuries. For info and screenings go to: bigworldpictures.org/tamingthegarden