Films by Salomé Jashi

Switzerland, Germany, Georgia 2021, 91 min
by Salomé Jashi

The opening shot of filmmaker Salomé Jashi’s 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.

Germany 2017, 74 min
by Salomé Jashi

The film takes a small town television station as the centerpiece of its story and draws a pseudoethnographic portrait of a community in Georgia. Rituals and traditions define the lifestyle here, though a distant crooked reflection of the modern world has already invaded the collective mind. Here performance of one’s self in the best possible way is of primary importance. This cinematic kaleidoscope of characters, places and events unveils the life of the local community and its hybrid values. The sole journalist of the television station, Dariko, is like Virgil from Dante’s Divine Comedy, taking the audience on a trip through the community’s moments of revelation.

Germany 2011, 58 min
by Salomé Jashi

A journey into a lively but rotting building – a microcosm intruded by the constant anticipation of change. A three-story brick building in a provincial Georgian town. At the center of the building is a restaurant whose walls are covered with bright green and orange plastic foam and where tables are set, waiting for customers – who rarely come. Just like customers, change also comes rarely here. Just like the others in the building waitress Nana and her boss are waiting... This building, which resembles Noah’s Ark, is a microcosm, a model of this troubled country with its endless demonstrations and opposition rallies. On the backdrop of political events, somehow, all of life is here.