Big World Pictures will release Taming the Garden, the Georgian documentary of how a powerful man indulges in an unusual hobby by having century-old trees uprooted in communities along the Georgian coast and transplanted to his private garden.

Directed by Salomé Jashi, Taming the Garden, winner of multiple film festival awards and a nominee for Best Documentary at the 2021 European Film Awards, will open at the New Plaza Cinema in New York on September 30th, and will screen at Laemmle Theaters in Los Angeles on October 10 and October 11.

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.

Watch the official trailer for Taming the Garden.