“Meditative, beautiful, and deeply moving.”
Playing in this year’s New York Film Festival’s Currents section is Alexandre Koberidze’s third feature, Dry Leaf. Coming off his stunning What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? (2021), one of the best films of the decade and among the finest of this century, Koberidze returns here to the technical style of his first film, Let the Summer Never Come Again. He abandons the 16mm crispness of What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?and instead embraces the pixelated lo-fi of a Sony Ericsson mobile phone camera from 2008. However, what he never abandons are his preoccupations: Georgian landscapes, culture, family ties, and football. These obsessions remain the main subjects and topics of his cinema, even as he continues to passionately reinvent the forms that carry them.
The story begins with a disappearance. A young sports photographer, Lisa, vanishes, leaving behind a letter to her parents telling them not to search for her. Her father, Irakli (played by the director’s own father, David Koberidze), cannot accept this and sets off to find her. He is joined by Lisa’s best friend Levani, and together they drive across rural Georgia, traveling countless miles, visiting football fields and village pitches, and asking locals if they have seen Lisa or heard word of her. Each visit becomes a small story and a small portrait of the village or football pitch at which they stop. These include atmospheric tales of children who play football, of animals wandering the fields, and of locals whose narration blends between the physical and the spiritual, between human and ghost.
The ghostly quality is heightened by Koberidze’s use of the old phone camera. The crushed, pixelated images, far from unpolished, lend the film a trancelike abstraction. It is never fully clear if the people we hear or see are alive or spectral. Are they voices from the present, or echoes of the past? The score, composed by Giorgi Koberidze (Alexandre’s brother), incorporates animal sounds, children’s chatter, and the music of landscapes, until narration and sound become one. The result is dreamlike and melodic, as if Georgia itself is hypnotizing the travelers and the audience.
The title Dry Leaf comes from football. In the late 1950s, Brazilian player Didi invented the “folha seca” (dry leaf) technique. The player strikes the ball in such a way that its trajectory becomes unpredictable, floating and meandering like a dry leaf falling from a tree. The metaphor could not be more apt to the characters and to the themes of the film. Just as the ball’s direction is uncertain, so too are the characters’ paths. Irakli and Levani do not know where they will end up, nor what they will discover about Lisa, about rural Georgia, or about themselves. And just as a football’s course is shaped by the wind, the grass, the player’s foot, and chance, so too are lives shaped by circumstances, by society, and by history. The leaf does not know where it will land, and neither do we as the audience or as humans.
The film is a road movie, but it is also a meditation on roads themselves. At one point a character marvels, “How wonderful it is that there are roads.” The road here is not just a path to be traveled but the path of where life will lead us. It is the thing that allows encounter, chance, and drifting. Every field, every stop, and every face becomes part of a mosaic of Georgia. Footballs, goalposts, and nets appear again and again in differing forms, scattered across the landscape. They are reminders of Koberidze’s love for the game and his understanding of it as both cultural fabric and existential metaphor.
Beneath the film’s beauty, there is loss. The film becomes haunted by questions of what Georgia was and what it is becoming. We hear of football fields being demolished to build hotels. We hear of youth leaving villages for cities. “If there’s no football stadium anymore, where do you play?” a character asks. The answer: “Everywhere”. It’s both hopeful and devastating. The fields are gone but the game persists, dispersed and surviving.
With Dry Leaf, Koberidze’s style remains mannered and distinctive. Like in What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?, narration guides us, pulling us into a world where magic and realism blur. Like in Let the Summer Never Come Again (Koberidze’s debut), the images are lo-fi, but they become strangely mesmerizing, pixelated yet precise, ethereal yet corporeal. There is an abstraction here that refuses to reduce the film to a simple story of a father searching for his daughter. Instead, it also becomes a story about what will happen to society, what will happen to families and individuals, and what will happen to football.
Dry Leaf is meditative, beautiful, and deeply moving. It is about disappearance and search, but also about landscapes, voices, animals, and football. It is about the unpredictability of life, the changes of culture, and the persistence of play. Above all, it is about Georgia, seen through the eyes of a filmmaker who has become a vital artist. Koberidze has once again made a work that feels singular, a film that could not have been made by anyone else, and that is one of the outstanding films of the year.