A 100-year-old tree floats slowly on a barge along the coast of the Black Sea. This singular shot, which channels as many environmental as migratory questions, is from the Georgian documentary Taming the Garden (2021) by Salomé Jashi. It recounts the mad idea of the country's most powerful oligarch and former politician to plant trees in his resort garden that are so old they will be able to purify the air.
"Bidzina Ivanishvili buys trees the same way he bought voters in 2012, by paying off the loans of 600,000 people to help Georgian Dream, the pro-Russian party he created and now supports from the outside...," explained the film's director at a café table in Sololaki, Tbilisi's oldest district. From here, you only have to look up to see another one of the billionaire's residences, commonly referred to as "James Bond's house," unless it's the replica of an international airport. Also visible are the pillars of the cable car that will soon transport people to his luxury hotel and golf course.
Presented at Sundance, the Berlinale and the Cinéma du Réel festival, Taming the Garden represents a new wave of Georgian films that have garnered international attention. In Paris, the multi-disciplinary festival Un Week-End à l'Est (A Weekend East) will be screening some of these beautiful productions from November 22 to 27: Blackbird, Blackberry, by Elene Naveriani, the sensual portrait of an austere grocery shop owner who discovers love on the eve of her 50th birthday; A Room of My Own (2022), a film shot during the pandemic by director Ioseb "Soso" Bliadze, about the life of Tina, who escaped from a hellish marriage, and her roommate Megi, who dreams of America; or Aleksandre Koberidze's What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? (2021), a tale where banality gets literally transfigured by the fires of love.
One common thread between these films is their attention to detail, their inclination for fable and dawdling, their spirit of independence prevailing over action and their rejection of a patriarchal society whose femicide rate is reaching new highs every year. Above all, their sense of the unusual and the marvelous, the same feeling you experience by walking along the facades of the 19th-century houses that rival each other in elegance and fantasy. "You can find a story for the cinema on every street corner," said Bliadze, his pink face phosphorescent under the spotlights of the Stamba, a former printing works converted into a five-star hotel where stray dogs (identified by their municipal microchip) can come and rest their paws on the lobby bench.
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