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By Glenn Dunks
Streaming now on MUBI.
The notes for Taming the Garden reference Werner Herzog and it’s not hard to see why. The absurd relationship between man and nature is as pivotal to Georgian filmmaker Salomé Jashi’s quiet and observant documentary as it is to so many of Herzog’s.
But Jashi’s film is nonetheless one all its own, blending modesty and spectacle in ways that may have its audience questioning the crux of its narrative just as much as its subjects do. It is the bizarre story of one (unseen) billionaire's efforts to uproot seemingly half of Georgia for his own pet arboreal project. Full of mesmerising static shots as trees are lumbered through the landscape looking like the Ents from Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings movies and where the sight of a 30-metre high tree being shipped over the Black Sea attains a surreal grandeur that belies its otherwise restrained tone.
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