“It Was Such a Jiggle of Consciousness, Such a Beautiful Monstrosity...”: Salomé Jashi on Her Sundance-Debuting Taming the Garden

Salomé Jashi is not a name I was familiar with before catching her exquisitely crafted Taming the Garden, which made its Sundance debut on January 31 in the World Cinema Documentary Competition. That said, the Georgian director (and founder of not one but two production companies), whose 2016 doc The Dazzling Light of Sunset took top honors at Visions du Réel, is certainly a prolific filmmaker I’ll now be keeping an eye out for. With her latest, Taming the Garden, a “cinematic environmental parable,” Jashi weaves together a series of perfectly composed shots, containing the lush magical nature on the Georgian coast, with a darker reality sometimes glimpsed only in fragments within the frame. It’s the tale of a wealthy and powerful man (tellingly, he’s never named), who has been traveling to impoverished villages for years to pursue the oddest of hobbies — collecting majestic trees, many of which have been part of their communities for over a century, silently bearing witness from as high as 15 feet above the land. In exchange for allowing (though one wonders if this is ultimately a matter of free will) the man to take away their towering giants and transplant them to his faraway walled-off garden, the residents are left with less foliage and meager payments. Also ripped up roads, massive empty holes, and the destruction of more ordinary trees that had the bad luck of standing in the way of machinery’s progress. Fortunately for Filmmaker, Jashi found time the week before Sundance to fill us in on her film’s origin story, the multiple themes she was attempting to unravel, and what it’s like to pursue nonfiction filmmaking within the confines of a politically unstable nation.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.