Part of What We See: New Georgian Cinema
Saturday, November 6, 2021, 4:30 p.m.
Museum of the Moving Image - Bartos Screening Room

Dir. Salomé Jashi. 2021, 90 mins. In Georgian with English subtitles. Somewhere far away, a wealthy man has taken up an unconventional, absurd hobby: he’s collecting centuries-old, skyscraper-sized trees from rural Georgia. Workers descend upon farms and hillsides to elaborately, industriously extract the trees, secure them to massive flatbed trucks, and guide them to the seashore, where they’re floated on barges to his private garden. Salomé Jashi’s celebrated documentary is a jaw-dropper, both in its visuals and the moral questions it raises. Each exquisitely composed shot is more astonishing—and unsettling—than the last, taking the full measure of how one man’s unchecked hubris makes a mess of the landscape, remapping villages, and leaving literal holes in communities.