Dry Leaf

When traffic lights talk to road signs and sports halls house great love stories, we are in the cinema of Alexandre Koberidze. For him, football and film are both media of emotion — of play, of technique, of wonder. Even the title “Dry Leaf” refers to a Brazilian shooting technique of the 1950s whose flight path is impossible to predict. This magical road movie unfolds in just the same way: full of unexpected directions that surprise and move you.

A father is looking for his vanished daughter. She was to photograph Georgian football pitches for a magazine — and never came back. He sets off, accompanied by an invisible friend, across the provinces. A road trip through abandoned pitches, villages and dusty squares, past meadows and fences that carry stories in them like memories. The search turns into a filmic album of Georgia, a meditation on sport, on nature and on everyday life.

Stylistically Koberidze picks up where his low-resolution debut “Let the Summer Never Come Again” left off: here too, extremely low resolution produces a poetic blurring, a kind of digital impressionism, images that feel like a dream refusing to come into focus. Sunsets, goats, branches stirring in the wind — magical and fragile. “Dry Leaf” is a questioning of seeing itself, carried by a formal rigour that holds all the way to the heartbreaking finale. A stroke of luck. A masterpiece. Not to be missed.

Shown at the 2025 edition of Around the World in 14 Films, Berlin.

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