Seeking to reduce a filmmaker’s chief thematic preoccupation is usually a waste of time, for any one worth their stuff works in a storm of competing and converging interests that, if they’re lucky, alights on the ground every few years in a distinct, feature-length form. Alexandre Koberidze, whose third feature, Dry Leaf, premiered at this year’s Locarno Film Festival, is no different. Since his feature debut in 2017, he’s established himself as a leader in a loosely articulated Georgian New Wave, whose characters are caught up in, and asked to navigate, the shifting ground of their national identity, modernity, tradition, progress, regress, and romance.
But one obsession rises above all the rest to crystalize them into an ecstatic, almost fantastical vision of the possibilities of contemporary life. Whether an aspiring dancer hoping to join a company, but caught up in illegal sex work and boxing in Let the Summer Never Come Again (2017), or a pharmacist and amateur soccer player pair embarking on romance who find themselves suddenly isolated in unfamiliar bodies What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? (2021), the characters in Koberidze’s films often find themselves carried through epic sagas on the winds of chance.
In Dry Leaf, a name taken from the football kick that floats, darts, drops, and lands unpredictably, Koberidze’s aim in charting the search by an athletics instructor, Irakli (David Koberidze), and sports magazine editor, Levani (Otar Nijaradze), for Lisa, their missing daughter and colleague, respectively, is similarly in service of delighting in the mysteries of circumstance. Relying on Levani’s fading memory of a trip he took with Lisa to photograph rural football fields, their halting expedition lasts just a few days; but over the course of 186 minutes, their largely internal journey takes on an epic quality.
Koberidze asks the viewer to surrender to the fantastical logic of his off-kilter worlds (for example, like many people in this film, Levani is completely invisible), in the same way he asks us to surrender to his images. Like Koberidze’s first feature, Let the Summer Never Come Again, Dry Leaf was shot on a Sony Ericsson, an early smartphone that ceased production in 2011. It’s no small task to get acclimated to the film’s blurry, pixelated, and occasionally overexposed images. The dramatic vistas of the Georgian countryside captured on the 15-year old cell phone are rendered in splotchy smears of muted, earthen color, the abstract limits of which Koberize explores through extended silences and digital zooms.
So too are the occasional bright interiors, such as the kitchen of Irakli’s aging uncle. Bright reds and blues of furniture; the green and rust gradients of apples on the table; a bright green water bottle held up by an arm dressed in plaid — all are rendered like a still life. Here, the pixels add to the objects’ sense of life rather than detracting from the so-called fidelity of the image. The effect is an impressionistic view of a near-forgotten country; feelings, rendered in hazy outlines, that have few means, other than in the missing Lisa and the dilapidated football fields Irakli and Levani encounter, of being literalized. The formlessness of Koberidze’s images, then, renders these merely plot-related facts of the world not just as parallel to its own scrappy, makeshift approach to expression, but as ecstatic proxies for lost cultural heritage.
Throughout their journey, Irakli and Levani come across more than abandoned football fields, but the villagers, often children, who still find ways to play on them; adults who live with their abstract memories; and animals, among them dogs, cows, donkeys, and countless horses, who silently persist. These meetings open up refreshing possibilities for Irakli and Levani, two people who, without any kind of hand-holding by Koberidze, embody a melancholic and distinctly male loneliness. This loneliness is rendered poignantly not just by the fact of Levani’s invisibility — a trait that is never remarked upon except for a perfunctory acknowledgement early on by the film’s narrator — but by the fact that each fleeting encounter with a stranger never once provides them with a meaningful clue regarding Lisa’s whereabouts. Taken solely as a means of finding Lisa, which is all the film explicitly purports to do, their trip is pointless. Appreciated as a site for the possibilities of personal transformation, the psychological terrain within and outside the bounds of their weekend road trip are fertile ground.
Published as part of Locarno Film Festival 2025 — Dispatch 2.
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