Doc Corner: Salomé Jashi’s 'Taming the Garden'

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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Doc Corner: Werner Herzog's 'Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin'

by Glenn Dunks

Is it a coincidence that I watched Werner Herzog’s Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin on the same day as Nomadland? Perhaps. Perhaps not. Maybe it was more just serendipitous that I turned my screener of Herzog’s film off just before leaving the house to go and see Chloé Zhao’s Oscar favourite. Maybe I am just feeling emotional about the very idea of being out in nature and enmeshed in a broader human existence, but both left me quite affected.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this double feature left me with the desire to walk home under the glowing blue sky with earth and tar and grass and cement under my feet...

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Doc Corner TIFF Special Edition: Werner Herzog's 'Fireball'

By Glenn Dunks

We're not covering TIFF more broadly this year, but I was lucky to snag a screener or two so we'll be writing about them in a couple of additional Doc Corner columns.

One of my favourite bits of movie trivia is that Werner Herzog is the only filmmaker to have ever directed feature-length films on every single continent. He completed that unique party trick with his 2007 Oscar-nominated documentary Encounters at the End of the World. I’m sure that if he could, he would make a movie in space. For now, however, his latest feature doc about the elements of space will have to suffice.

Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds begins in the terrestrial outback of Australia and ends in the shimmering blue plateaus of Antarctica with just about every other continent in between (he just can’t help himself). Herzog traces the history of meteorites with regular collaborator and first-time co-director Clive Oppenheimer...

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European Film Awards honor Antonio Banderas, Juliette Binoche, and The Favourite

True giants of cinema gathered in Berlin today for the annual European Film Awards. It was honestly a bit overwhelming to see Wim Wenders, Juliette Binoche, Claire Denis, and Pedro Almodóvar all sitting side by side in the front row. How to even imagine the cinema without them? 

In a surreal sort of way, what was happening on stage was even more overwhelming... but for its inexplicable surreality (more on that in a bit) and its time travelling nature.Regarding the latter due to the indifferent nature of release dates across borders the overall champ was The Favourite which had its American awards run a full year ago. 

The winners and more commentary follows.

Costuming goddess Sandy Powell and the producers of The Favourite

FILM The Favourite
COMEDY The Favourite...

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Doc Corner: Global Politics with AOC, Herzog, and Gorbachev

By Glenn Dunks

Two new documentaries cover politics in very different ways. One pounds the pavement on the trail of a brewing political movement from a relative newcomer, while the other examines the legacy of a presidential icon as directed by a man with nearly 40 documentary credits (and dozens more dramas) to his name.

Knock Down the House and Meeting Gorbachev are a fascinating pair; the scrappy underdog and the classic image of government. Although they have almost nothing in common beyond the surface, they offset one another, their strengths highlighting the others’ weaknesses in a particular way. One stands above the other in quality and in the sly way that they interrogate the long shadow of history...

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