A transport scene from Taming the Garden (Big World Pictures)

Amid discussions about the haves and have nots in a world with a fast-increasing wealth gap, Salomé Jashi’s disturbing documentary Taming the Garden provides a cautionary tale about those with too much money. Jashi’s camera records what Bidzina Ivanishvili, the billionaire ex-prime minister of Georgia, does with his excess cash: He creates an enormous private garden made up of imposing old-growth trees that have been uprooted and moved from other areas of the country, which causes environmental and ethical hazards for others to deal with.

Jashi not only follows the actual moving of these trees but also conversations among the men who are doing the heavy work of replanting these behemoths—along with locals who watch—with a mix of surprise, excitement, and sadness, as these precious trees are torn out of their own neighborhoods. The unexpected fallout includes additional trees having to be cut down to make way for the giant ones as well as power lines rerouted and even new roads built to help transport the trees.

As a metaphor for our world, the eccentricity of Ivanishvili (who remains an unseen presence throughout) is nearly perfect, but Jashi doesn’t push it to the forefront. Instead, she takes the opposite approach, eschewing narration, presenting the unfolding events with no commentary and allowing ordinary people, for and against the project, to speak among themselves. Indeed, except for snatches of talk, the only sounds we hear are those of the monstrous pieces of machinery breaking ground, tearing out vegetation, clearing land, reshaping the landscape to suit one man’s whim.

Jashi’s camera seems bemused by what it records. It’s probably because so many images look unreal—the fourth or fifth time we see a huge tree on a barge being floated across the waters of the Black Sea is just as surreal, just as unearthly, and, it must be admitted, just as beautiful as the first time. Her film has the look and feel of a mass hallucination, much like what Werner Herzog, in documentaries like Lessons of Darkness, achieves with his stunningly idiosyncratic images.

Of course, it’s not just a hallucination but a strange and troubling reality that Jashi reveals. The dichotomy between the beauty of the images and the destruction behind them is what makes Taming the Garden—a particularly apt title that is the closest Jashi comes to editorializing—necessary viewing for anyone who cares about the welfare of our planet.