Directed by: Alexandre Koberidze
Distributed by: Cinema Guild
Written by Eric Zhu
92/100
Undoubtedly one the best films of 2025, Alexandre Koberidze’s third magical-realist pastoral stretches an intimate premise to a transfixing, epic scale. Opening in Tbilisi, “Dry Leaf” is an existential missing-persons case, following an aging father, Irakli (Alexandre’s father David Koberidze), as he embarks on a search for his daughter, who disappeared while photographing abandoned football fields in the Georgian countryside. Along with his daughter’s young colleague, Levan, the pair hop in Irakli’s trusty Subaru for a Kiarostami-inflected road trip, touring the country through its provincial sporting grounds. Through a series of poetic, docu-fictional digressions, what the pair find is a country in flux, as children describe the effects of global warming on crop harvests, and bulldozers carve through the verdant landscape.
“Dry Leaf” is defined by two wildly inventive formal decisions. First, many of the characters, including Irakli’s primary companion Levan, are invisible. Throughout their existential odyssey, Irakli is frequently conversing with empty space (echoes of “Cemetery of Splendour”). What seems like an establishing shot or a lyrical insert may in fact be the impetus for a shot reverse-shot, and the possibility that any image holds the possibility for human interaction permeates the frame with grief, which could be for Irakli’s daughter, the destruction of the ecosystem, or the perpetually dissipating communities through which the pair wander.
This ghostly dimension to “Dry Leaf’s” images is enhanced by the other unavoidable aspect of its production. Returning to the shooting methods of his debut feature “Let the Summer Never Come Again,” Koberidze shot the entirety of “Dry Leaf” on a 2008 Sony Ericsson W595. This results in images that are littered with digital artifacts, significantly more-so than even the reclaimed miniDV images that we associate with the earliest stages of digital filmmaking.
Koberidze’s act of taking a perversely outdated aesthetic and reframing it as poetry is powerful and endlessly generative, especially in a space where tentpole filmmaking and artificial intelligence play on an “uncanny valley” hyper-reality. In its most immediately affecting reading, the degenerated blocking of the image renders the characters onscreen as transient figures. Animals and children running through the frame phase in and out of their environments, and in more conventional “portraits,” the softened outlines of characters’ bodies give the impression that they might dissolve into their surroundings at a moment’s notice. In this defiantly anti-contemporary image, we get the sense that these are beings on the precipice of obsolescence, but also in complete harmony with the world.
The effect pays incredible dividends on “Dry Leaf’s” depiction of landscape. As wind blows or a beam of light ripples through a landscape, the nature of the digital image reveals previously unseen worlds of color. Patches of flowers, or even entire animals are unveiled by the elements in ways that feel genuinely miraculous. Through the lens of the Sony Ericsson, we’re given a glimpse into layers of ineffable beauty.
The ambiguous realism of the Sony Ericsson is therefore a generous one, allowing for Irakli to coexist and commune with absence. “Dry Leaf’s” 320p frames inject every pixel with unseen presence, expressing the sentiment that those we’ve lost live on through our memory, perpetually shaping our perception. In “Dry Leaf,” it’s the lifeblood of these spirits that blurs and distorts the frame. It’s trite to describe a film as “alive” or “human,” but as the pixels regularly refresh, “Dry Leaf’s” rhythmically pulsating images look as if they contain a heartbeat. The hills are alive in Georgia, and they have a resting heart rate of 60 beats per minute.
Like many of the best films, “Dry Leaf” is endlessly thought-provoking, but gracious and easygoing on a moment-to-moment basis. Unencumbered by narrative, it’s motivated by the simple pleasures of pastoral vistas, rich humanity, and occasionally, pure visual experimentation (an entire sequence seems to exist because Koberidze wondered what a car wash as shot by a Sony Ericsson would look like). In one of the most startling, but nonetheless indicative moments, Koberidze zooms into geometric abstractions, breaking the diegesis to remind us that the foundation of cinema, and our lives, is the humble sensation of light and sound. As Koberidze slowly zooms outwards, the world reconstructs itself, pixel by pixel. In this moment of cinematic rebirth is something truly profound about the alchemical nature of reality.
This interrogation of artifice is just another of “Dry Leaf’s” connections to Impressionist painting. The murky landscape images recall Monet, and even Seurat at times as adjoining blocks of complementary colors create a pointillist effect. When Koberidze pans to still lives of a bowl of apples, or apricots strewn across a table, he inevitably invokes Cézanne.
In line with the Impressionists, “Dry Leaf” embodies the universality of subjectivity. Much of “Dry Leaf” functions as a wordless landscape film, albeit one that derives meaning from the attention called to its construction. In this manner, Koberidze’s film is also a moving documentary of its own creation, which reveals itself as a supremely tender film about filial love, following a son as he observes his father wandering through the unknown. The third member of the crew that should be mentioned is Alexandre’s brother Giorgi, who not only completed the film’s sound, but also composed the omnipresent classical soundtrack, replete with arboreal woodwinds and lush string arrangements. The familial intimacy is palpable, and while watching “Dry Leaf,” the recognition that this is a film based on a family road-trip, documenting the creation of a marginal film engaging with the sights and sounds of marginalized lives both tangible and intangible is a powerful one. The film’s subjectivity is collective, its spirituality summoned by Irakli’s plangent form, Giorgi’s music, Alexandre’s gaze, and those of the myriad characters they meet throughout the course of the production. Some encounters have pointedly political dimensions (in one instance, Irakli’s uncle recalls Georgia’s history of Soviet Occupation), and there’s a latent politics to the abandoned livestock and parentless children that the group meet, but for the most part, the humans the Koberidzes meet engage in mundane, but nonetheless affecting conversation not unlike those in Kiarostami films such as “Life and Nothing More…” or “The Wind Will Carry Us.” With each passing interaction, the image takes on the memory of their presence.
“Dry Leaf’s” handshake with Impressionism also connects this tradition of painting, that elevated texture over academic form, to the lyricism of Kiarostami, Apichatpong, and even experimentalists like Dorsky and Baillie, filmmakers who peel back layers of reality to reveal private worlds of beauty and pain.
In other words, “Dry Leaf” takes extra care to acknowledge the historic lineage of its aesthetics, and one of its most impressive feats is that it synthesizes so many disparate touchstones into something wholly original. That aesthetic contextualization intersects with the film’s treatment of human time. If we consider the Sony Ericsson image as existing between analog film stock and contemporary digital, then the images in “Dry Leaf” gesture towards a future of inevitable obsolescence. In these fields, the goalposts are made to look like ruins, relics of human history (and an analog to cinema) that hold memories of their own. Koberidze frequently composes both tree trunks and goalposts such that they bisect the frame, making the historical presence of these spaces so undeniable they feel like obstruction. When Irakli returns to the city, and we learn that the sports university where he teaches is being torn down, the melancholic urban imagery briefly turns modern-day Tbilisi into a ruin of its own. Koberidze portrays the world in a perpetual slippage, and “Dry Leaf’s” life-affirming power derives from its belief that transcendence is inextricable from transience.
“Dry Leaf” Trailer
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