Final Rating: 4/5
Dry Leaf is a challenging, deeply affecting film showcasing a unique view of the Georgian countryside. Shot on a 2008 Sony Ericsson phone, Dry Leaf is at once modern and dated, director Alexandre Koberidze simultaneously capturing the past and the present and placing them in direct conversation.
Dry Leaf opens with Irakli (David Koberidze) receiving a phone call about his daughter, Lisa. Lisa, a sports photographer, has gone missing while documenting football fields of local villages. However, since she is of legal age and there’s no evidence of foul play, the police are powerless to search for her. Instead, Irakli seeks out Lisa’s friend Levan (Otar Nijaradze), and the two embark on a journey to retrace Lisa’s steps in an attempt to track her down.
When Levan is introduced, an omniscient narrator chimes in with a clarification: “Levan, like many in this film’s reality, is invisible.” As the frame moves to show an empty football field, he continues, “for example, there are two people in the frame now.”
This line leads to the most fascinating elements of Dry Leaf, as Koberidze prompts viewers to consider not only what they see on screen, but also what they cannot. Dry Leaf contains many shots of empty fields, uncrowded city streets, even plenty of scenes of Irakli seemingly talking to nobody. But in the context of the film’s world, the audience is left to wonder if these scenes are truly empty. Explicitly, what if this empty football field is actually hosting a rowdy game between invisible participants. Implicitly, what is the story behind a given locale?
Lisa’s role as a sports photographer builds on this motif. All the energy and action of sports, even when captured by a skilled photographer, is just part of the story. The rest of the action, in and out of frame, must be imagined by the viewer. Sports photography, then, is an artform with an inherent incompleteness.
As Irakli explores the Georgian countryside, Koberidze captures this same incompleteness. We don’t see the full picture that Irakli sees. Like the audience for Lisa’s photography, what’s captured in frame is only a part of the story.
Another aspect adding to the incompleteness is the compression caused by the Sony Ericsson camera. Dry Leaf is low-resolution, individual pixels visible in every frame, people and animals appearing as little more than blobs if they’re ever further than a few feet away. Even the clearest images can often take several seconds to interpret, but Koberidze is more than willing to let the audience sit with his visuals.
By requiring the audience to read between the lines, Dry Leaf is an intensely engaging film. The people and animals that inhabit Koberidze’s world feel like they lead full lives, even when they are only ambient to this film. “The dog who likes laying in the grass, the donkey that lost its owner…”
The places, too, feel lived in. When Koberidze shows empty grass, there’s a sense not just that it used to be a popular location, but that it currently is full of life and action, even if we can’t quite see it.
The film’s loose plot adopts the structure of a neo-noir. As Irakli and Levan question villagers about Lisa, their target remains just out of reach. The two men can only ever see part of what Lisa has already seen, just as the audience can only see a smaller part of that. Dry Leaf presents a compressed image of a compressed memory of a compressed moment but shows that the beauty of the original remains regardless of how much is lost over time.
Dry Leaf was seen during the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival. Thank you to Gloria Zerbinati for the screener.
