A Georgian Billionaire And The Park For Traveling Trees
February 11, 2021 14:33 GMT
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A new Georgian documentary tells the tale of a billionaire s quest to move 200 massive trees, at huge expense and with great difficulty, across land and sea to a private park. Taming The Garden, by the filmmaker Salome Jashi, premiered at this year s international Sundance Film Festival. Georgian businessman and former Prime Minister Bidzina Ivanishvili is said to have ordered the trees for his family s Shekvetili Dendrological Park. The park s director defended the tree transplantation, telling RFE/RL that only one had withered in transit and that around 1 million people had visited the park in the second half of 2020.
Beginning by Dea Kolumbegashvili
TBILISI: Georgia was strongly affected by the Coronavirus pandemic, which shut down cinemas and film production for most of 2020, but Georgian films received new awards at international festivals. Georgian cinema days and retrospectives were held in Brussels, Tallinn, Split and Lisbon, and Georgia was the Focus Country at the 2020 Trento Film Festival.
Hundreds of films made from 1921 to 1991 are to be returned to Georgia under a deal signed with the film archives of the Russian Federation in 2016. The Georgian National Film Center (GNFC) declared 2020 the year of the 1920s cinema. Despite the epidemic situation, eight films from the 1920s brought from the Russian film archives Gosfilmofond were restored, in cooperation with the National Archives.