Dry Leaf

Director: 

Aleksandre Koberidze

Genre: 

Drama

Country/Region of production: 

Germany/Georgia

Synopsis:

Photographer Lisa disappears suddenly. Her last known trail leads to seven football fields she photographed, scattered across seven remote villages in Georgia. Her father Irakli and her close friend Levani travel across these fields in search of her. As they move from one field to another, the villagers they meet and their stories pass in quick succession, yet hope of finding Lisa fades like morning mist.

Why we recommend it:

This is an unprecedented cinematic experiment: At a time when the industry is pursuing 4K and 8K ultra-high-definition imagery, the director shot the entire film using a Sony Ericsson mobile phone, creating a uniquely raw, blurry, and pixelated visual texture. This "retreat to advance" approach softens focus and flattens the frame, yet unexpectedly lends the footage an immersive quality and poetic feel reminiscent of open-world video games from the 2000s.

As a heartfelt "family workshop" production, this is a deeply personal work. The director's father plays the leading role of Irakli, and his brother handles the music and sound design, making the entire film feel like a road trip shared by a father and his two sons. The director has admitted that one of his motivations for making the film was simply to spend more time with his father. This intimate, family-based creative process fills the movie with distinctive warmth and sincere emotion.

Here you will find poetry and philosophy in a road movie: Structured around a journey to find his missing daughter, the film travels between football fields in seven remote villages across Georgia. The title, Dry Leaf, is a football term referring to a shot that barely spins in flight and follows an unpredictable path – much like the protagonist's journey. On the surface, it is a search for a daughter; in essence, it is a wandering and homecoming to a native land. In interviews, the director noted that he wanted to use this work to "understand what it means to live here, and what it feels like to be Georgian."