Two of documentary cinema’s current fascinations – the foibles of the super-wealthy and the environmental cost of our way of living – are brought together in this extraordinary, savagely poetic film. In the republic of Georgia, a billionaire – the former prime minister Bidzina Ivanishvili – has a hobby. He collects trees. But not just any trees: he favours huge, ancient and rare examples that have been a constant in the lives of the people of the Black Sea coast for generations. The chosen trees are gouged out of the ground, leaving raw gashes of stripped topsoil, and transported at vast expense and inconvenience to their new home, the Shekvetili Dendrological Park.
Ivanishvili is absent from the film, but his autocratic whims – part folly, part power flex – are the subject of much debate among the Georgian people. Some are gung-ho: he builds roads in order to transport the trees, improving the infrastructure of the area, they argue. More often, though, they weep over the aftermath of this ego-driven environmental vandalism.
