Several recent documentaries, too, have created a buzz. Levan Koguashvili’s Brighton 4th, a story of a Georgian father travelling to New York to help his debt-ridden émigré son, won the best international feature award at the 2021 Tribeca Film Festival. Another critically praised debut, and Georgia’s 2020 submission for the Academy Awards, Dea Kulumbegashvili’s Beginning follows the wife of a Jehovah’s Witness preacher caught in a stifling, claustrophobic world of religious and patriarchal oppression. The worlds of sports and organized crime clash in Negative Numbers, a 2019 prison drama and feature debut by Uta Beria. “When it comes to form, it is hard to do something new and different in the cinema, yet that film did just that,” Georgian film critic and historian Teo Khatiashvili told Eurasianet. Described by Variety as “magical and mischievous,” Alexandre Koberidze’s film is a love story that also looks past its love-struck protagonists to focus on the romance of the everyday world around them, beautiful small things we usually take for granted. On the fiction front, critics also raved over 2021’s What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?, a fairytale-like shaggy-dog story. “The whole country is the real garden which he has attempted to subdue, reducing it to the tamed sterility of private property,” the Guardian wrote in its review of the film. “The sight of these astonishingly old and large trees just floating serenely along the coast of the Black Sea is just – that’s a vision I will never forget,” Turan told NPR. Jashi’s film is perhaps the most prominent example of a new wave of Georgian documentaries and dramas that have been making a splash in the independent film world.Īmerican film critics David Fear and Kenneth Turan singled out Taming the Garden as one of the highlights of the last Sundance Festival. The controversy also struck just as Georgian film was enjoying a new renaissance, with the small country becoming a darling of the international independent film world of late. The news of award-winning documentary getting shut down for political reasons in Tbilisi swiftly snowballed into a major scandal, as concerns have been mounting about the government’s heavy-handed interference in Georgian art and culture. “Like in politics, you never see him, but he is everywhere at the same time.” “He is kind of a mystical protagonist of the film and also of Georgian politics,” Jashi said. While Ivanishvili is barely present in the Taming the Garden – his name uttered only a handful of times and he is never pictured – the film shows that he can almost literally move mountains in his country. He briefly served as prime minister, and while he no longer holds any formal position, his informal power remains immense and little stands in his way when he sets his mind to rearranging the nation’s presidents, ministers – or trees. Pedestaled upright on heavy-haulers and barges, arboreal giants go lumbering through the countryside and sailing across the sea.īut the billionaire also is the country’s behind-the-scenes leader, Bidzina Ivanishvili, who midwifed the ruling Georgian Dream party into existence a decade ago. Taming the Garden captures hypnotic scenes of enormous trees seemingly coming alive at the billionaire’s whim. It focuses on an eccentric billionaire’s unique hobby: uprooting massive, century-old trees around the country and replanting them in his seaside park. On first glance, the film is not particularly political.
But at the last minute the Academy’s director, Mindia Esadze, told Jashi that her film “creates political divisions in the public.” It did get shown once at the Academy’s movie hall, on March 28, but subsequent screenings were canceled.
The film had a series of screenings scheduled at the Georgian Film Academy, Tbilisi’s main venue for showing and discussing independent film. “The film had been screened at virtually all major international film festivals, yet in Georgia it is shown essentially in the underground,” its director, Salomé Jashi, told Eurasianet. Instead, it has been screened only in small, countercultural spaces like experimental theatres and cafés. An American production company just bought the rights to show the film in the United States and Canada.īut at home in Georgia, it’s faced a frostier reception. The 2021 film Taming the Garden has become Georgia’s most celebrated documentary in recent years, competing at the Sundance Festival, showing at the Berlinale Forum, and garnering a variety of international awards.
Canceled in Georgia (Taming the Garden/Mira Film)