It has been four years since Georgian filmmaker Alexandre Koberidze stunned the world with his beautifully enchanting What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? (2021). This year, he returns with Dry Leaf. Though it received only a Special Mention at Locarno, it arrives in London as a quiet revelation, gentle yet mesmerising.
★★★★★
Shot on an old Sony Ericsson phone, this melancholic mystery begins with Lisa, a young photographer, who disappears and leaves behind a letter. Her father, Irakli, played by David Koberidze, the director’s father, sets out in search of her. Travelling through Georgia with Lisa’s colleague Levani (Otar Nijaradze), he retraces her steps across the country, visiting football stadiums where she had been working on a project that was supposed to pair her photographs with Levani’s words.
In a time when Oppenheimer, Sinners, and One Battle After Another have turned the IMAX screen into a spectacle of immersion, and when smartphone competition revolves around ever higher camera resolutions, Koberidze moves in the opposite direction. Like Hong Sang-soo, whose What Does That Nature Say to You (2025) and In Water (2023) embrace lo-fi and sometimes out of focus abstraction, he rejects technical perfection for poetic imperfection. He once again takes on multiple roles as director, writer, producer, cinematographer and editor, returning to the same Sony Ericsson phone he used for his debut Let the Summer Never Come Again (2017). The result is a tapestry of crushed pixels and impressionistic blur, images so fragile they seem to dissolve into mystery, a space different from our own.
From this fragility, a sense of ghost emerges. Without revealing too much, Koberidze’s introduction of Levani feels at once utterly natural and quietly miraculous. It carries a spiritual echo of Twin Peaks and Lynch’s dreamlike world, guiding us into a realm suspended between reality and fable. As the journey unfolds, the camera lingers on sleeping dogs, wandering donkeys, empty football fields, and houses long abandoned. Their stillness is not absence but presence, each space haunted by those who once inhabited it. Blending fiction with documentary-like fragments, Koberidze conjures the ghosts of history within the Georgian landscape. When pixels flicker within still shots one could blame the limits of an old phone, yet it feels instead like a visitation, as if something invisible is moving across the frame.
Through this poetic voyage from village to village, the film becomes a land where ghosts of many kinds coexist: ghosts of memory and time, of history and grief, of faith and ideology, of modernisation and loss. The communist past and religious tradition linger beside traces of urban expansion and economic change. Some ghosts are personal, tied to private recollection; others belong to the land itself. Together, they form a quiet chorus of what has been left behind. With a haunting score by the director’s brother, Giorgi Koberidze, the film listens to what remains after people have gone, the objects, sounds and spaces that still speak of them.
The title Dry Leaf carries a double meaning: first, the literal leaves that carpet the football grounds and whisper beneath each step; second, the football term “dry leaf,” a kick whose flight dips unpredictably. The film embraces both senses, its images and rhythms echoing that same spontaneity and wonder. Just like Laura Citarella’s beloved mystery-drama film Trenque Lauquen (2022), Dry Leaf rejects plot and convention of storytelling, finding its charm in sincerity, human connection and the unique unpredictability that feels melancholic.
The Verdict
Dry Leaf is a work that words cannot fully express. It belongs to the cinema, to be seen, heard and felt. Koberidze invites the audience not to decode meaning but to dwell within it, to listen to the silences between images. In that quiet act of watching, we rediscover what cinema can still be, an art that asks us to feel before we understand.
Words by Matin Cheung
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