Director: Alexandre Koberidze
Writer: Alexandre Koberidze
Stars: David Koberidze, Otar Nijaradze
Synopsis: A father searches for his daughter Lisa, a sports photographer who disappeared while documenting rural soccer fields across Georgia, joined by her enigmatic best friend.
Alexandre Koberidze is a filmmaker who sends the viewer into a realm of dreams when watching one of his pictures. His focus on creating sensory experiences through magical realism helps us be transported from the cinema to his worlds. He casts spells in his pictures to immerse us in these stories. One of the best experiences I had while covering the 2022 New York Film Festival was watching Koberidze’s sophomore feature, What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?, where a narrator gives the viewer instructions and signals for when to close your eyes and open them back again.
The film was about a meeting between two strangers, Giorgi and Lisa, who bumped into each other while getting lost on their way home. They meet again by fate time and time again. So the two plan to meet each other at a local café the next day. But something strange happens. The two become victims of the curse of the evil eye, which changes their appearance and memories. The narrator guides you into the spell’s enchantment. When you open your eyes again, it has been cast, and that small yet beautiful moment has stayed with me ever since. What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? felt like a parent reading a fairytale to their child, while also encapsulating the essence of what it feels like to fall in love.
It was a magical experience that’s hard to replicate. But Koberidze is such a craftsman that he once again transports us into his dream worlds with his third feature, Dry Leaf (screening in the Concorso Internazionale at the 2025 Locarno Film Festival). This latest work by the Berlin-based Georgian filmmaker is darker and colder than his previous feature, replacing the pristine look with low-resolution footage tinted with a foggy hue. Yet, like some other films screened at Locarno this year, amidst the darkness lies a light, the beauty of the world we inhabit, in Koberidze’s film. Our life’s quandaries slowly consume the shadows of the images, and from there emerges a touching and transfixing experience.
Dry Leaf places a man, Irakli (David Koberidze, the director’s father), in a canvas of shadows after receiving a note that his twenty-eight-year-old daughter, Lisa, a sports journalist, last known to be taking pictures of old football fields, has gone missing. The local newspaper has been tracking her progress as Lisa finds scenic fields around the country, but she lost her footing as the expedition progressed. As any father would in such a situation, Irakli grows increasingly worried by the minute, all while pondering the reason why she left or what drove her to make such a decision. Is she alright? Has something affected her so deeply? These are questions that float in Irakli’s mind and whose potential answers roam in the shadows of each scenery in Dry Leaf.
In a desperate act, Irakli sets out to find his missing daughter. Accompanying the grieving father on the travels is Levan, a colleague of Lisa who helped her during her previous photo project. However, the passenger is invisible, as are the other people Irakli encounters during his search. Cities once blazing with sun-kissed light turn into solemn ones inhabited by ghosts. Koberidze once again performs a cinematic magic trick to capture a feeling he has deep inside – his version of replicating an emotional amnesia that blinds the people and forces them to confront their losses over time. Dry Leaf is yet another picture by Koberidze that showcases changes in the imagery and characters.
Once living flesh, now are disembodied voices; once shot on camera, now looking murky and fractured. These changes blur the spectator’s mind and create new tangible images that spark intrigue and raise doubts about what is hidden behind Koberidze’s magic trick. Much like the images themselves, Irakli’s journey is composed of moments where he does not know where he’s headed, or what has changed in the places he once knew. He looks into the void of Koberidze’s lens and finds that there is an incompleteness to this world. Time and age slowly reveal the fragments missing, much like us watching as we analyze what we are seeing. But Dry Leaf becomes a paradox right before our eyes.
For nearly three hours, we venture forth, placing ourselves in Irakli’s shoes, yet in our own hometowns, where we see the toll of time, those things that are reconstructed and those left behind. The latter is evident in Dry Leaf through the worn-down soccer fields, an element also present in Koberidze’s previous project, but with a different connotation. Something is fascinating about how he depicts the global sport and its significance to him. It is viewed with a sense of remembrance, a nostalgia for a time long past. This has been done before in many sports movies, not specifically about soccer. But Koberidze’s approach is more subtle, relying on the meaning behind a place and activity rather than showcasing the physicality of the sport in a match or scrimmage. He deems it as an intricate part of his culture, part of what makes us human.
Koberidze thinks that its essence is being lost amidst the ever-changing woes of modernization. Where soccer fields once stood, there are now buildings or apartment complexes — an erasure of culture and humanity. The missing daughter truly is our loss of connection with our roots, culture, and life itself. Koberidze employs minimalist yet technically complex methods to tap into deep, heartfelt emotions and thoughts that have lingered in our minds. It is demanding, sure, as the still composed images and their unhurried pace do take a toll on the viewer who’s not entirely immersed. Yet, those who become one with the frames will be met with an enriching experience by one of modern cinema’s minimal magicians.
