This article appeared in the March 27, 2026 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

Dry Leaf (Alexandre Koberidze, 2025)

Georgian filmmaker Alexandre Koberidze specializes in the bait and switch. In each of his three features so far, he starts with a recognizable narrative premise only to let it dissolve into patient observation. Let the Summer Never Come Again (2017) begins as a loose coming-of-age story before giving way to a drifting portrait of life in Tbilisi, while What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? (2021) opens as a body-swap mystery before expanding into a lyrical portrait of everyday life in Kutaisi. Plot becomes secondary to movement, encounter, and digression.

Koberidze’s latest feature, Dry Leaf, takes this modus operandi to thrilling extremes. In what seems like the start of a missing-person yarn, Irakli, a teacher at a sports university in Georgia, begins traveling across the countryside searching for his daughter, Lisa, a photographer who disappeared after leaving behind a vague letter. The only clue to her whereabouts is a project she’d been working on, documenting football fields scattered across the Georgian landscape. Why did Lisa vanish? And does football, her and her father’s shared passion, have anything to do with it? In search of answers, Irakli (played by the director’s own father, David Koberidze) sets off to visit one field after another, hoping that somewhere along the way, someone might have seen her.

Then comes the bait and switch. As Irakli moves from village to village, Koberidze slows rather than quickens the pace of the film, dwelling leisurely in each of his protagonist’s encounters. Farmers pause to speak with Irakli, strangers offer fragments of memory, and children point out what once existed in the spaces he passes through—fields where games were played or gatherings took place. A boy explains how the frost took the vineyard: first their livelihood, then their food. An elderly man invites Irakli into an abandoned village club to show him what it once was, recalling a lively past before an earthquake left it empty for years. The camera also lingers on the animals that traverse these spaces—cats resting in the shade, cows grazing in open fields, dogs wandering across empty roads. Stretching languorously across the film’s three-hour runtime, Irakli’s search for his daughter becomes a reflection on other disappearances—of lives, communities, traditions.

Then there are the literally invisible people. We often see Irakli conversing with characters who never appear in the frame—like his traveling companion Levan, whose voice is his only trace in the movie. Once or twice Irakli even reaches out to shake someone’s hand, only for the camera to reveal that no one is there. Our eyes search the frame, expecting the film to restore the usual visual logic of conversation. But the more it happens, the clearer it becomes that the absence is an invitation: by keeping certain characters out of view, the film redirects our attention from people to the spaces they inhabit.

Koberidze shot the film himself on an obsolete Sony Ericsson cellphone camera—the same device that he used for Let the Summer Never Come Again. The phone belongs to an era when digital cameras were suddenly everywhere, but their images still felt fragile, prone to breaking apart. By filtering the Georgian landscape through it, Koberidze turns that texture into a subtext; the grain is the residue of an ephemeral technological moment. The film unfolds in a low-res, impressionistic haze, the visuals so pixelated and unstable that they swirl the landscape into washes of color and light. For eyes accustomed to ultra-crisp digital cinematography, it may be jarring, but gradually, the blur becomes a kind of enchantment. At one point, the camera zooms in on a patch of leaves until the image becomes completely abstract, then pulls back to reveal that we’ve moved to an entirely different place.

This visual teleportation is Koberidze’s brand of magical realism. Working with this out-of-date technology, the writer-director conjures a kind of cine pobre, finding elasticity in the image itself and making the world feel fluid, porous, and slightly out of reach. It is less an intrusion of the unreal than a subtle reorientation of how we see reality, closer to a tradition of magical realism grounded in perception. By softening the world’s digital sharpness, Koberidze suggests that the marvelous is not separate from the everyday, but already embedded within it. We just have to squint.

Sound becomes the film’s most stable reality. When Irakli speaks to Levan, we hear the rustle of fabric, the shift of weight on gravel. These details give concrete presence to what isn’t visible. The film treats the invisible as already there, registering beyond the visual, through sound and other forms of perception. The soundscape is primarily environmental—wind, bells, animals—and these noises function not as background, but as equal participants in the story. Giorgi Koberidze’s score begins with a staccato, syncopated rhythm that feels separate from the scenery, before it yields to the ambient space, allowing the hum of the countryside to take over.

As the film approaches its end, the search for Lisa undergoes a final transformation. In retracing the path of her photography project, Irakli is no longer chasing a ghost; he is occupying her gaze. The football fields he visits emerge as the last vestiges of communal architecture—rectangles of cleared earth that persist even as the villages around them thin out. They are spaces of ritual that have reverted to nature, goalposts standing like skeletal remains. Empty, overgrown, and bathed in that low-res glow, the fields eventually cease to be clues and instead become shared spaces where father and daughter finally meet. Dry Leaf leaves the viewer not with the closure of a missing person found, but with the tangible and enduring texture of a world that remains, stubbornly and beautifully, alive.

Fatoumata Bah is a New York–based writer whose work focuses on film and visual culture.