The opening shot of this 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. (Salomé Jashi, Germany/Georgia/Switzerland, 2021, 92 min.) In Georgian with English subtitles
University of the Arts has updated its COVID policies for visitors and events, effective Aug. 22. Masks are now optional for all members of the community and campus visitors in all of the university’s public spaces, including the Levitt Auditorium. If you are feeling unwell, we strongly recommend that you consider not attending a Lightbox screening. Masks are still available at all Public Safety stations across campus.
