DRY LEAF

Already from the outset of this highly original road movie, the camera focuses on a dry leaf – as fragile as the imagery shot on an old Sony Ericsson mobile phone. Sports photographer Lisa vanishes without warning, leaving behind a letter asking not to be found. She was last seen photographing rural football fields in remote Georgian villages. Her father, Irakli, unable to accept her disappearance, sets out on a journey to find her. He teams up with Levani, Lisa’s enigmatic best friend, and together they travel across the countryside, retracing her steps through quiet villages, meeting kind strangers, and talking with children playing football along the way. What they uncover are only fragments of Lisa’s presence – traces that become increasingly elusive the further they go. Just as they begin to lose hope, a mysterious event offers one final clue, drawing Irakli and Levani into the unknown and rekindling a faint glimmer of hope. “In Alexandre Koberidze‘s 2021 breakout What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? the audience is politely requested to momentarily close their eyes… Defiantly peculiar, Dry Leaf is a joy for devotees of the strange, the singular, and the sometimes transcendent. It’s a movie to ride shotgun alongside, with the windows down on a lazy trip to nowhere in particular, that ends up taking you everywhere in particular” (Jessika Kiang).