Salomé Jashi's documentary 'Taming the Garden' awarded Mexico's UNAM festival awards
A still from 'Taming the Garden', a Sundance- and Berlinale-screened documentary. Screenshot from film trailer.
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Film director Salomé Jashi's new documentary Taming the Garden collected two awards including the Best Film prize at Mexico's UNAM film festival on Sunday.
Celebrated by the team that produced the work as the "first major award" for the Sundance- and Berlinale-screened film, the feature was also selected for the Audience Award at the Mexican event.
Jashi's creative team broke the news to their social media followers with an announcement that said they were "honoured and happy" to have received the two awards for the Swiss-Georgian-German co-production.
The success follows the Special Mention of the Young Jury Award at the Cinéma du réel international festival for the documentary a week ago, with juries of the French event praising it for showing a "tragic side of uprooting and the domination of man over man" through "the power of its mise en scène".
In Taming the Garden Jashi's lens observes residents of a locality in Georgia in their reactions to seeing unique trees removed from their habitat and ferried away.
The words of the French festival jury follow the acclaim for the documentary at Sundance for its "astonishing cinematic style" and for its director - recipient of awards from Jean Rouch and Nyon film festivals, among others - for "shrewdly observant eye".
Taming the Garden is scheduled for further festival runs, with screenings at the Hong Kong International Film Festival and the Environmental Film Festival at Yale on the calendar, among other dates.