Neither tugging at the heart-strings nor sprawling indulgently across your whole afternoon, The Garden is that best case scenario of a documentary – efficient and moving, exhaustively covered but brief in execution. What at first seems like a simple story of city hall stomping all over the little guy becomes something much more complex and ends up less an indictment of the greedy and powerful so much as a look at the human condition.
After the South Central riots in 1992, a great thing was done – a city block that had burned to the ground was granted to a group working-class farmers who created an extraordinary garden from which they could feed themselves and their families. It was an astounding co-operative, an oasis in the middle of an abandoned war zone run by real salt-of-the-earth types who feed their families with the break of their backs and the sweat of their brows.
Which makes it all the more maddening when they come to the garden one day to find an eviction notice paper-clipped to the gate.
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