Dry Leaf: A Conversation

Alexandre Koberidze, Dry Leaf (still), 2025.

For this week’s Film Notes, film critic Nataliia Serebriakova and Lukas Brasiskis speak with Georgian filmmaker Alexandre Koberidze about Dry Leaf (2025), his third film. Premiering at the Locarno Film Festival, where it received a Special Mention, Dry Leaf, which was shot entirely on a Sony Ericsson W595 phone, emerged as one of last year’s most surprising and bracing experiments in cinematic form and film poetics. Koberidze achieves this through a low-definition, painterly image and a loosened approach to storytelling, letting absence shape the film’s sense of presence.

Question: How did the concept of Dry Leaf develop, and why did you decide to move away from urban subject matter?

Alexandre Koberidze: The initial idea for Dry Leaf appeared while I was working on What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? (2021), my previous film.1 In 2019, I made the decision that my next film would again be shot on my phone, with a very small team, and that I would film it myself. I realized that I really missed a sense of improvisation, having more time, and having more freedom in my decisions. Because my two previous films were focused on two different cities in Georgia, I felt it would be good to move away from that. There is always the danger of repeating yourself. With What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?, there was no initial plan to focus so much on the city, but because we were physically there and I was interested in it, the film still became very closely connected to Kutaisi. So I thought that, in order to avoid making yet another “city film,” I should now shoot in the countryside.

I was also interested in exploring the country. I have been around Georgia, but not as much as I did while shooting this film. It became a good opportunity to look at the country I live in and to really ask: What is this place?

Slowly, ideas started to appear. Since it is a road movie, there has to be a reason for the characters to move. I do not know how other people work, but for me this time the process consisted of building the story piece by piece, adding elements that would give it more motivation, so that it would not be just a random trip, but an actual story with a beginning and an end, while still keeping a sense of freedom in between.

Q: Why did football fields across the country become such a central element in the film, and what do they represent for you both visually and socially?2

AK: There was also a moment when I asked myself: Why football fields? Why not, for example, old cinemas? It really could have been anything, but eventually, you have to make a choice. These football fields had many layers for me, even if I was not always conscious of them. They usually represent what is happening in a particular place. If a field has become overgrown with trees and tall grass, it means that nobody has played there for a long time. It means that there are no young people left and that the village is slowly becoming empty. But if there is no high grass, even if you do not see anyone playing at that moment, you can feel that someone takes care of the place, that people still come there from time to time. It means that there is still some energy left.

These places are also visually very beautiful in their own way, because they are not official, state-built football fields. They are made by the people who live there, maybe even by children. That is why they are all so different and improvised. Sometimes they are built in places that are not really suitable for a football field, but that may be the only horizontal surface in a mountainous village. You can see how much creativity people are capable of when they truly want to play.

Q: Do you mostly live in the city? 

AK: Yes.

Q: Was this your first really long journey through Georgian villages?

AK: I have spent summers in villages before, but I never lived in one permanently. In many places I was in the same position as the characters, seeing them for the first time.

Q: What phone model did you use as a camera?

AK: It is a Sony Ericsson W595.

Q: The same phone you used to shoot your first film, Let the Summer Never Come Again (2017)?

AK: Yes.

Q: That is very interesting. How did this non-smartphone model end up becoming the camera you use for your films?

AK: I used it as my regular phone until 2019. Before that, I did not use a smartphone, and everything was very simple. But during the preparation of my previous film, communication became very difficult. People from the costume department, for example, needed to send pictures, and if you do not respond quickly, you slow down everyone’s work. So I decided to get a smartphone. I thought that after the film I would return it, but once you start using it, it is hard to stop. Now I use this old phone only as a camera, not as a phone.

Q: In our contemporary visual culture, high-definition images have become the default. What draws you to a low-resolution image, and what do you want this type of “poor” image to do to the viewer’s perception? 

AK: I don't think it's poor. And even if you put the word “poor” in quotation marks, it still leads us in the wrong direction. “Less clear,” yes, “less resolution,” yes, but none of that means it’s poor. We would never describe a painting that doesn’t have high photographic sharpness as poor—perhaps we might even say the opposite. In order to give reality its own touch, the artist must remove something from it. One difference between artists lies precisely there, in who removes what. The more you remove, the more that remains for the spectator. One believes that if you don’t show something or don’t say something, it will be taken away from the spectator, but it’s exactly the opposite. The empty spaces in the image, in the sound, in the dramaturgy, belong to the spectator.

Q: Your second film—What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?—was a larger scale production, with a bigger crew and a different working process. Did any part of that experience leave you disappointed and wanting to make a smaller film again?

AK: I would not say that I was disappointed. It is just a completely different process. When you work on a script with a large team, you have to discuss it with many people and explain and justify everything you write. Then, every time you decide how to film something, you have to discuss it with the cinematographer, make a joint decision, and see if it is even possible. It is a long and complex process, and in this constant communication some things can get lost. Sometimes, the moment you put an idea into words, it already loses some of its power. And if you talk about it for weeks, it can also become less exciting.

On the other hand, during these discussions you gain something as well, because it is no longer just one mind working, but many people contributing ideas. Sometimes very beautiful things emerge from that, things that would have been impossible if I were working alone. But there are also moments when you see something and instinctively want to film it, without thinking about it too much, without explaining it to anyone. That is only possible when you are alone with your camera and you do not have to justify your choices. So I would not say that one way is better or worse. They are just very different ways of working. For me, both are interesting and valuable.

Alexandre Koberidze, Dry Leaf (still), 2025.

Q: Levan and Lisa are the characters that are invisible in the film. Lisa's disappearance seems to catalyze the story, yet she never appears on screen. That made me think of films like Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura (1960), where a character’s disappearance becomes less a mystery to solve than a void that reorganizes the film’s attention and emotional gravity. What did the characters’ invisibility or their absence mean for you?

AK: Well, we don’t see Levan and Lisa in the film, but for different reasons. Levan is often present in frame, yet he is invisible. The fact that Lisa is gone is the starting point of the whole film, so it was clear that we wouldn’t see her, at least until Irakli finds her. Levan does not follow Irakli when he enters the house to meet Lisa, and neither does the camera—it's a simple act of gentle ethics.

I do not have a clear answer to what it means. Sometimes ideas appear to work precisely because they leave space for interpretation. I think that this element can evoke many different readings. I would be curious to see a film where similar characters appear and to understand how I would interpret it as a viewer. But for this film, for me, it was more about creating a world in which this kind of characters exist. That, in itself, seemed interesting. It was also a question of form: how to film them, how to make them part of the film while they remain invisible. In that sense, it is more of an aesthetic way of thinking about how to construct the image and the atmosphere. I am also trying to leave this question open for myself, because I think it is something I want to explore in my next films as well and maybe, over time, understand better what it represents for me or where it comes from. 

Q: It seems that in every new project you test new formal or technical methods of making a film. In your debut film, you used the Sony Ericsson phone as camera for the first time. In the second film, you had a pause between two parts—the moment of closing eyes. And in Dry Leaf, you created characters that viewers cannot see. Do you already have any original ideas for your next project?

AK: Well, I hope so. For me, besides the fact that these elements appear later in the process, they somehow give me energy to continue. In such a long and difficult process, there are so many doubts. Sometimes you read the script and forget why you are doing it, because you do not see anything interesting there anymore. It is always like that: one day you think, “Yes, I really want to make this film,” and the next day you lose the reason. These small, strange ideas help me remember where the joy is, or what is genuinely exciting. Because if I start to doubt everything about Dry Leaf, I can still remember that I have to film these invisible characters. Immediately I feel curiosity and a certain joy, even though I do not have any clear answers to my own questions.

As for the next film, I am still searching. Of course, there are already certain elements in the script that fascinate me, but I feel that the aspects that will truly amaze me and make me dive deeply into the project are still to come. I think they will be born during the actual work on the film. For now, I try to hold myself back a little, because it is not 100 percent certain that we will start filming soon. I do not want to disappoint myself by thinking too precisely about how I would make the next film and when, in the end, not making it at all. So I am waiting for more confirmation that, yes, we are really going to do it, and only then I will fully immerse myself in it.

Q: How do you find an unusual form for a relatively simple plot? 

AK: I do not know. I never actually try to make something unusual on purpose. It is more that when you try to do something relatively simple, you inevitably get lost at some point and start looking for a way out. In that process, certain things appear that may be less common than what we usually see in everyday life.

But I never start a project with the intention of making something “different.” It is more that I watch films, read various things, and then feel a desire to create something in that direction. And, perhaps fortunately, in the end it becomes something different anyway. 

Q: It seems that you avoid psychological explanation, as if the film is less about understanding the motivations of the human characters than about encountering an unknown world together with them. Does filming landscapes improvisationally allow a filmmaker to say as much as focusing on human drama does? 

AK: I followed my taste and feelings. It sounds pretentious, I know, but why pretend that I had to say something and I used this or that to do so? When I was writing the script for Dry Leaf, I had clearer ideas and also a desire to realize them. We had planned to film around spring 2022, but what happened in February 2022 made me rethink everything. Russia’s full-scale invasion into Ukraine changed everything. For some time I didn’t want to film at all, and later it became clear to me that, even if I did film, it wouldn’t have been something I wanted to do, because I had changed. All the clear ideas became obscure, and the fact that I felt lost meant to me that the film had to be a search for something, not an execution of answers.

Q: How was it to work with your father, who played the main role of Irakli, and your brother, who composed the film’s experimental score? 

AK: I think it was very important for the film that they were there. When we started filming, I was a bit lost, both in terms of how to make it and, more generally, what exactly I wanted to do. I knew the beginning and the ending of the film, but I was not sure about the middle part, which is essentially the main body of the film. I had a very precise script, but I decided that I did not want to follow it anymore. I thought: “OK, I will just take the journey and see what happens,” which is not easy, because maybe nothing will happen at all. You are on the road, trying to understand what you want to do, while not really knowing. It takes time—sometimes you need to just wait, and sometimes you suddenly realize what you want.

I think that having my family members around me made me calmer. I did not feel that I was in a big rush. I also felt a kind of trust from them, a sense that everything would be fine, that if we did not know the answer today, we would know it tomorrow. That was very inspiring.

As for the music, it was also a long process. My brother was working on his own album while we were filming. It was not originally meant to become part of the film, but because it was happening in parallel, and because he was with us during the journey, I think the trip inspired his music. And then, in return, his music also started to influence the way we were imagining and feeling the film

Alexandre Koberidze, Dry Leaf (still), 2025.

Q: Animals and other nonhuman presences recur throughout the film, shifting the mood toward something gentler, even slightly uncanny. What drew you to filming them, and what do you think these encounters bring to the film that human characters cannot?

AK: This was never a plan. Maybe I knew I wanted to film trees, but the rest came in the process. There is a gap between us and them; more than a gap, maybe. We exist together in visual reality, but I have a feeling our realities flow in parallel: they can enter ours, but we almost never enter theirs, except maybe sometimes for milliseconds—milliseconds of happiness. Maybe through filming them, I was trying to get a little bit closer to them, not just for a second, but for at least a few of them. Every time they would appear somewhere where we were, I was simply amazed to be near them and to see how beautiful they were. It was very hard not to film them. 

Q: Your film is structured like a search, following the traces Lisa left behind. It made me think of Miguel Gomes’s Grand Tour (2024). Were there specific films or filmmakers you were thinking with while making Dry Leaf? 

AK: Of course. Whether we want it or not, everything that we have seen or read before becomes part of us and later appears in our work in different ways. Sometimes it is very conscious, sometimes less so. Every decision we make, where to place the camera, when to move it, what to notice, is connected with the past and with the things we have seen and loved.

During the making of this film, I started to think a lot about the animation Hedgehog in the Fog, which I have known all my life.3 Somehow, in the process, I realized that there were certain similarities between Norstein’s animation and Dry Leaf, even though the former is a very short animated film. Hedgehog in the Fog is also a kind of road story: the hedgehog goes somewhere, gets lost, experiences something, and arrives as a different hedgehog than the one who left. I think there were some visual similarities as well, although this was more of a coincidence—with this phone, you cannot really control the visual style. Of course, you choose the locations, the time of day, the light, and so on, but still, some images ended up resembling that animation. That gave me even more reason to think about it, and maybe to rewatch it and reflect on it again.

Q: How was Dry Leaf financed, and how would you describe the current situation with public support for filmmaking in Georgia?

AK: This film was financed partly by the Georgian National Film Center, but we received that funding in 2021. Since then, things have changed a lot. Nowadays there is no connection at all with the Film Center. I, and the majority of filmmakers here, do not work with them anymore. And since it is the only state institution funding film, for almost two years now there has effectively been no public film financing for the majority of Georgian film projects. At this year’s Tbilisi Film Festival there were a few Georgian films, but they were mostly projects that had started in previous years. I honestly do not know what will happen next year. There are a few films that we hope will be finished, but the number is getting smaller and smaller. This situation is directly connected to the political reality in the country.

Q: The situation looks somewhat similar to Ukraine’s, but hopefully it is a little better in Georgia.

AK: It is different in the sense that, in our case, the government does not even pretend to have doubts anymore. It is controlled by the Russian government. I think that is a big difference compared to Ukraine. It has been a kind of occupation carried out over time, during which they slowly took control of every part of the state, piece by piece, until it became clear that they control almost everything.