A tree crosses the sea: how the richest man in Georgia buys and transports the bushes of the poorest farms

A century-old tree floats in the middle of the Black Sea.

The reflection of its branches on the gray waters only makes the impossible of the scene more evident: a tree perhaps ten meters high floating in the sea.

On the shore, two locals watch.

They are not surprised: it is not the first time they have seen it, and it will surely not be the last.

It is a story that has been repeated for some time throughout Georgia, a former Soviet republic located between Russia and Turkey.

A story of traveling trees.

We are talking about a movie scene, but not a fantasy movie.

(2021)

is a documentary directed by Salomé Jashi (Tbilisi, 41 years old) that tells the story of these traveling trees.

It begins precisely with that scene: a tree floating under a cloudy sky, on a calm sea.

How did you get there?

Where does it come from?

Where are you going?

Bidzina Ivanishvili is a mysterious character.

He is the richest man in Georgia and probably also the most powerful: he was elected prime minister of his country in 2012, and only 13 months later he left the post considering that his job was done.

The party he founded, Georgian Dream–Democratic Georgia, has ruled the country ever since.

But he lives apart from public life, to the point that his compatriots doubt if he is still in the country.

On top of a mountain next to the old town of Tbilisi rises an impossible construction, a kind of cross between a Crusader castle and the international airport of a second-rate emirate.

It is the house of Ivanishvili, the house where he may or may not live: a fortress of steel and glass that no Bond villain would disdain.

A house that houses some of the most valuable works of Western art in its interior – the painting

was acquired at auction in 2006 for 95 million dollars – and that is surrounded, on the outside, by several dozen hundred-year-old trees which, unlike what happens to most trees, have been born in places other than the one they occupy now.

Salomé Jashi, the director of 'Taming the garden'.

Where others would have only seen a business transaction, Salome Jashi saw a story.

"It's an exquisite story," he explains to ICON.

“Collect large ancient trees.

He orders his men to uproot those trees and take them to his garden by land and sea.

But in the film it becomes the story of the powerful and the weak, the rich and the poor."

"Have you heard the story of the old woman and the tree?"

A local talks with another in a scene from the film.

They recount how Ivanishvili's lawyers turned up one day at the home of an elderly local woman.

They ask her how much she wants for the tree and the woman says four hundred.

Four hundred lari, almost one hundred and twenty euros.

"Four hundred

is a lot, we can give you forty

."

The old woman, of course, sells the tree.

It is a story that could be taken from

, or from a tale by Perrault or the Brothers Grimm: you would only have to change Ivanishvili for an emir or a prince.

His emissaries appear one day and offer fantastic sums for some trees that their owners had no value for.

Trees that shaded the orchard, or that littered the garden with leaves.

But as in fairy tales, all that glitters is not gold.

Moving gigantic trees is not an easy task.

The roads are narrow and surrounded by houses and trees.

To move a tree you have to cut down the ones that are in the way.

Some fences need to be removed.

The uprooting work takes months.

A man complains to the lawyers that they have been harassing him and his neighbors for a long time.

The lawyers reply: "You signed a contract."

The man argues and walks away, making vague threats.

But the film does not pretend to take positions.

“I think the public is smart enough to connect the dots, make judgments, think, ponder.

I'm not a fan of one-dimensional answers, because in life they don't really exist.

How am I going to reach a conclusion in ninety minutes?” argues the filmmaker.

Certainly, the issue is complex.

For every felled tree there is a fixed road, or a shored slope.

The lawyers will go, but the arrangements stay.

Neighbors get more than just money.

But they also lose more than just a tree.

A woman cries.

"So many generations have played under that tree," she laments herself.

In another scene a man exclaims: “But is it that we are running out of trees?”.

All around her you can see that it is not.

There are few dialogues in this story.

The scenes that follow one another are a testament to the engineering work involved in moving.

Trees that make their way among other trees, advancing very slowly but unstoppably.

All around him the people seem tiny.

It could be seen as the triumph of humanity over the world.

It could be seen as the will of a rich man overriding the natural order of things.

Jashi chooses not to.

He chooses to show the facts with an almost dreamlike lyricism, as if it were a legend or a fable.

“Many different movies could have been made about this event.

We could have made a movie centered on the rich man, showing him, talking about his hobbies.

We could have made an investigative film about the somewhat suspicious involvement of the state in the process.

It is such a big story that a single movie is not enough to tell it.

We would have tied the film to a specific moment in time, but I was curious about the metaphorical, symbolic and poetic connotations."

A gardener waters the transplanted tree.

From the chaos of rural villages it has passed into the domesticated order of Ivanishvili's garden.

He looks like he's been there forever.

We do not see the villagers again.

We do not know what has become of their fences, their houses and their roads.

Ivanishvili Garden opened to the public in 2020. Visitors take guesses.

Why this fixation with trees?

Some think that perhaps he is a druid and uses them in arcane rituals;

Others think it's simply a display of his power, something he does because he can, to show that, despite having held no political office for years, he can still widen roads and stop trains on a whim.

There are no answers to those questions.

The only person who could provide them has no intention of doing so.

That is why Jashi's film refuses to give context, to expose conclusions.

Instead, he prefers to give us the impossible image of a hundred-year-old tree that, surrounded by mist, floats in the middle of the Black Sea.

'Taming the garden' can be seen

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