A century-old tree floats in the midst of the Black Sea. The reflection of its branches on the gray waters solely serves to underscore the impossibility of the scene: a 32-foot (10m) tree floating within the sea. On the shore, two locals watch, however they don’t seem to be stunned: it’s not the primary time they’ve seen this type of scene, and it’ll certainly not be the final. It’s a story that has been repeated for a while all through Georgia, a former Soviet republic situated between Russia and Turkey; a narrative of touring bushes.
We’re speaking a few film scene, however it’s not a fantasy film. Taming the Backyard is a brand new documentary by Salomé Jashi, a 41-year-old filmmaker from Tbilisi who informed the story of those touring bushes. It begins exactly with that scene: a tree floating below a cloudy sky, on a peaceful sea. How did it get there? The place does it come from? The place is it going?
Bidzina Ivanishvili is a mysterious character. He’s the richest man in Georgia and possibly probably the most highly effective one, too: he was elected prime minister of his nation in 2012, and solely 13 months later he stepped down his put up after contemplating that his job was executed. The get together he based, Georgian Dream-Democratic Georgia, has dominated the nation ever since. However he lives away from the general public eye, to the purpose that his fellow Georgians wonder if he continues to reside within the nation.
On the prime of a mountain subsequent to the outdated city of Tbilisi there rises an unimaginable construction, a sort of cross between a Crusader fortress and the worldwide airport of a second-rate Arab emirate. It’s Ivanishvili’s property, the residence the place he might or might not reside: a steel-and-glass fortress that no Bond villain would look down upon. This home accommodates a number of the most beneficial works of Western artwork – the portray by Picasso Dora Maar with Cat was acquired for $95 million at public sale in 2006 – and it’s surrounded, on the skin, by dozens of century-old bushes which have been born in locations apart from the one they’re planted now.
The place others would have solely seen a enterprise transaction, Salomé Jashi noticed a narrative to inform. “It’s a pleasant story,” she explains. “[Ivanishvili] gathers giant historical bushes. He orders his males to uproot these bushes and take them to his backyard by sea and land. However within the movie all of it turns into the story of the highly effective and the weak, the wealthy and the poor.”
“Have you ever heard the story of the outdated lady and the tree?” an area man asks one other in a scene from the movie. They recount how Ivanishvili’s legal professionals turned up in the future on the residence of an aged lady. They requested her how a lot she needed for the tree and the lady mentioned “4 hundred.” 4 hundred lari is sort of €120. “4 hundred thousand is loads, we can provide you 40,000.” The outdated lady, in fact, offered the tree.
It’s a story that might have been taken from One Thousand and One Arabian Nights, or from a story by Charles Perrault or by the Brothers Grimm: you’d solely want to vary Ivanishvili for an emir or a prince. His emissaries seem in the future and supply implausible quantities for some bushes that their house owners don’t worth. Timber that shaded the orchard or littered the backyard with leaves. However as often occurs in fairy tales, all that glitters just isn’t gold.
Transporting gigantic bushes just isn’t a straightforward process. The roads are slim and surrounded by homes and extra bushes. With a purpose to transfer a tree from its place, it’s important to chop down those which might be in the way in which. Some fences must be eliminated. Uprooting work requires months. A person complains to the legal professionals that they’ve been bothering him and his neighbors for a very long time. The legal professionals reply: “You signed a contract.” The person argues and walks away, making imprecise threats.
However the movie doesn’t take sides. “I feel the general public is wise sufficient to attach the dots, make judgments, suppose, ponder. I’m not a fan of one-dimensional solutions, as a result of in life they don’t actually exist. How am I going to achieve a conclusion in 90 minutes?” argues the filmmaker.
Actually, it’s a advanced matter. For each felled tree, there’s a repaired highway, or a shored-up slope. The legal professionals will depart, however the improved infrastructure will stay. Neighbors get extra than simply cash, however in addition they lose greater than only a tree. A girl cries. “So many generations have performed below that tree,” she says. In one other scene, a person exclaims: “Are we actually working out of bushes?” Wanting round him, we will see that’s not the case.
There are few dialogues on this story. The scenes that observe each other are a testomony to the engineering work concerned in transporting the bushes. Timber that make their approach amongst different bushes, advancing very slowly however unstoppably. Across the bushes, individuals appear tiny. It may very well be seen because the triumph of humanity over the world. It may very well be seen as the need of a wealthy man overriding the pure order of issues. Jashi chooses to not. She chooses to indicate the information with an virtually dreamlike lyricism, as if it had been a legend or a fable.
“Many alternative motion pictures might have been made about this occasion,” says Jashi. “We might have made a film targeted on the wealthy man, exhibiting him, speaking about his hobbies. We might have made an investigative movie in regards to the considerably suspicious position of the state on this course of. It’s such a giant story {that a} single film just isn’t sufficient to inform it. We might have tied the movie to a selected second in time, however I used to be curious in regards to the metaphorical, symbolic and poetic connotations.”
A gardener waters the transplanted tree. It has handed from the chaos of rural villages to the domesticated order of Ivanishvili’s backyard. It looks like it’s been there without end. We don’t see the villagers once more. We have no idea what has occurred to their fences, their homes and their roads. Ivanishvili Backyard opened to the general public in 2020. Guests make guesses. Why this obsession with bushes? Some suppose Ivanishvili could also be a druid that makes use of the bushes in arcane rituals; others suppose it’s merely a show of his energy, one thing he does as a result of he can, so as to present that, regardless of not having held any political workplace for years, he can nonetheless widen roads and cease trains on a whim.
There aren’t any solutions to these questions. The one one that might present them has no intention of doing so. That’s the reason Jashi refuses to supply context, to attract conclusions. As an alternative, she prefers to current us the unimaginable picture of a century-old tree, surrounded by mist, floating in the midst of the Black Sea.
‘Taming the Backyard’ is accessible on the streaming platfom Mubi.