Taming the Garden — a mesmeric film about a billionaire buying trees

The figure at the centre of the mesmeric documentary Taming the Garden never appears on camera. He is barely even mentioned by name. Still, Bidzina Ivanishvili — a former Georgian prime minister, now simply the country’s richest man — is present in every shot. Ivanishvili made his money in metals and banking. (His estimated worth is now $4.8bn.) Among the many hobbies he has pursued, the latest involves the giant trees of coastal Georgia.

In recent years, he has often bought them whole — all at least a hundred years old, the taller the better — and had them transported to a private garden (now partly open to the public). Much of Salomé Jashi’s extraordinary film simply stands and watches, witnessing the ballet of diggers, the object of their attention then tugged surreally down the Black Sea shoreline on a barge, roots, soil and all. (Jashi has said the engineers’ pride in their work helped her to secure her footage.)

She also stays to capture the ripped-up landscape afterwards. Locals speak of the deeply 21st-century clash in which they find themselves: one between public land and private whims, the environmental and economic. One man boggles at others’ lack of gratitude for what the billionaire underwrites. “They’d rather have a tree than a road!” Less ardent voices are heard as workmen cut down trees outside their homes, not because Ivanishvili wants them, but to make room to uproot the one he does. Neutral parties speculate this is all a scheme to prolong his life, like an arboreal Dracula. Jashi does not give her opinion. She just lets her images speak for themselves, scenes from a mad modern fable.

★★★★☆

In UK cinemas from January 28