Festivals - Sundance Film Festival 2021 : Taming the garden will have its world premiere

By Mulder, 05 january 2021

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.

Taming the garden (Switzerland/Germany/Georgia)
Written and directed by Salomé Jashi
Produced by Vadim Jendreyko, Erik Winker, Martin Roelly, Salomé Jashi
Cinematography : Goga Devdariani, Salomé Jashi
Edited by Chris Wright
Sound Design : Philippe Ciompi
Music Supervisor : Celia Stroom
Researcher : Tamara Mshvenieradze
Line Producer : Pascal Moor
Distributed by Syndicado Film Sales (https://syndicadofs.com)
Release date : January 31, 2021 (Sundance)
Running time : 86 minutes

Premiere : jan. 31 - 6:00pm // Second screening : feb. 2 - 4:00pm (local time)

(Source : press release)