A summertime romance is told through the small vignettes of city life. Two lovers suddenly can’t recognize each other in a riverside town. A father looks for his missing daughter in rural football stadiums. These are the kinds of stories that move Georgian filmmaker Alexandre Koberidze: intimate, small in scale, unassuming even, yet deeply and genuinely felt through every single frame that composes them. Their mere description evokes a certain narrative timelessness. The characters and situations might be set in what, on the surface, looks similar to our “real,” contemporary world, but everything flows differently in Koberidze’s films.
The facade of verisimilitude is stealthily eroded without any sense of bombast or dramatic revelation, like being lost in the woods and stumbling into one of the wondrous realms only possible in fairytales. Then again, there’s nothing outwardly fantastical in Koberidze’s narratives, just a slight varnish of whimsicality that rewires everyday life into something unusual, a quirk of the world that’s never explained or dissected beyond the way it shakes the characters’ own personal arcs. It is an economical form of storytelling rarely seen in contemporary narratives, with little regard for Themes, Psychology, or Cultural Significance; its commitment is towards tone and affection, and how these mold the universe around them through expressive use of cinematic language.
Dry Leaf (2025), just like Let The Summer Never Come (2017) before it, was shot on an old Sony Ericsson phone. Its low-fidelity resolution and pixelated textures are an immediate affront to the unofficial guidelines and standards of so-called quality cinema; even more daring is just how nonchalant the film is about the “novelty” of its register. Its aesthetic crudeness isn’t portrayed as a big stylistic gesture or a dissertation on “poor images,” it simply is presented as the sensory wavelength that this specific effort warrants.
Comparisons to impressionistic painting will be plenty, and there is something to that; to how mood delineates the clarity of the depiction, and how by avoiding naturalism, one can fill in the gaps with emotion. After all, Dry Leaf continues Koberidze’s fascination with tender melancholy, these seemingly slight fables of people seeking affection and eventually discovering it through the journey, and how this changes their relationship to what surrounds them. Letting moments breath is paramount to Dry Leaf’s beguilement, where the blurred, warm tableaux of the Georgian landscape takes over the film from time to time, like a meditation on Irakli’s (David Koberidze) discreet odyssey, a sort of dialogue with what could be the nature photographs of his missing daughter Lisa.
As time goes by in this three-hour long film, the stealthy layers of lyricism show their cumulative effect. Music and mise-en-scene are fully interwoven into Dry Leaf‘s narrative fabric, making us feel deeply about (literally) invisible characters, our resistance overpowered by its unrepentant sincerity. Community football stadiums and the people who frequent them, worn-down farmhouses and the animals that inhabit them, Georgian forests and those who might’ve lost their path within them… diversions in Koberidze’s film are an enchanting and infectious result of its abounding wonderment, yet even calling them that implies a narrative hierarchy that it simply lacks. The myriad footnotes and digressions are the storytelling.
As in the oral tradition, when new elements are introduced the bypass the restraints of plot and instill an intangible relationship with what’s being told. Dry Leaf is the kind of film that understands that in the case of cinema, there’s redundancy in describing these kinships, as the freedom of having sights, sounds, textures, and time at one’s disposal allows them to emerge organically, through the emotive associations that we can’t really explain or even pinpoint, just tightly embrace as they overtake our senses.
Alonso Aguilar
Edited by Robert Horton
© FIPRESCI 2025