Trees have feelings too in environmental arthouse parable, TAMING THE GARDEN

An immersive, very slow chronicle of redefining landscapes and inequality, Taming The Garden documents the feeling of several trees in Georgian communities before their transportation at massive expense and severe inconvenience. These arboreal giants, part of the landscape for decades in multiple coastal towns – one old woman had even planted some of them in her youth – are torn asunder on the whim of a powerful figure: uprooted from their homes to be replanted in the private garden of the Republic Of Georgia’s billionaire former prime minister.

Roads are widened to accommodate these mammoth beasts, with more trees being cut down to facilitate this in some terrible reverse ecology. Beeches, chestnuts and more are taken, with financial recompense given, but that cannot erase memories, connections and debate. The march of machine into the woodlands, diggers clawing at the land, searchlights grimly illuminating deforestation in darkness, men wrapping sheets around root structures for preservation whilst other trees are chainsawed into oblivion: all of this creates a growing diatribe against the reattribution of nature.

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Half-built bridges form backdrops for trees being transported by barge, huge beasts travelling where no tree has been before. Writer/director Jashi maintains a cool, clinical distance from proceedings, lingering over workmen and slow transportation. Humans are involved, occasionally bursting into anger, sometimes into tears, others welcoming technological advances and better roads – but a pervasive melancholy hangs over all.

Taming The Garden is a strange, quiet and sometimes frustrating film about man’s arrogant determination to shape his environment whatever the cost, shot through with an often mesmeric beauty. The money of the ex-PM contrasts with the exploited poverty of his former subjects in this arthouse political critique.

Dir: Salome Jashi (15) (91 mins)

Released in cinemas on Fri 28 Jan

words KEIRON SELF