“The Garden” is a documentary about an urban garden in downtown Los Angeles, and the community’s fight to keep the garden from being redeveloped. This garden is special because it’s in an area that was once part of the 1991 LA riots, but has been transformed into something positive for the community. The documentary takes us through the community’s fight to keep the land for their garden, and keep it from the greedy owner/developer and the corrupt city government that did not have the constituent’s best interest at heart.
“The Garden” was nominated for the 2009 Academy Awards for best documentary. It of course lost to “Man on Wire”, but it deservedly was nominated because of its good documentary form. My first reaction when I started watching it was the poor camerawork and poor color. LA is best place in the US to shoot a film because of the amount of bright light they get 360 days a year, yet sky in this film had a blueish tint to it. Also there was shaky camera work, I think they were using prosumer and maybe consumer level cameras.
Yet it’s content that matters. Kudos to the editor for telling a story through visuals, interviews, and sound. The sound design was nice, although my TV’s speakers experienced some problems in parts of the film, which I thought was very weird considering how tiny my speakers are. Overall though I liked the film because there was a lot of passion involved and the story’s revealing is far reaching to other parts of the US, where land owners and community work for different goals.