Salome Jashi’s documentary Taming the Garden (2021) shows how ancient trees from across Georgia are being uprooted and elaborately transposed on behalf of Bidzina Ivanishvili to be transplanted into his park. Ivanishvili is a, or rather the Georgian oligarch. He made his enormous fortune in Russia in the 1990s under conditions that, with the best will in the world, cannot be described as transparent.
Jashi’s film not only shows the caprices of a super-rich eccentric, but also the danger of capital that has hijacked the state. Ivanishvili’s “Georgian Dream” party, founded in 2011, won the 2012 elections, and he was Prime Minister of Georgia for a short time. Although he has repeatedly announced his retirement from politics, he continues to set the course in Georgian domestic and foreign policy. The key ministers are his employees from the private sector days. The oligarch and his party control the executive, the legislature and judiciary, much of the economy and the media. For this reason, even if Georgia has the facade of a parliamentary republic, it is more correct to speak of the oligarchic regime of Ivanishvili.
