Shot on a W595 Sony Ericsson, Alexandre Koberidze’s impressionistic Dry Leaf travels through rural Georgia as a man, Irakli (David Koberidze) searches for his daughter Lisa who has disappeared leaving only a letter telling her family she will be gone for a while. Irakli feels Lisa’s disappearance is out of character, and although she is an adult, he decides he will attempt to find her with the help of her journalistic partner Levani (voiced by Otar Nijaradze). Koberidze’s film is a meditation on what is recalled and recorded. A memory being created in real time but with the notion of fading memory built into the film’s purpose.
Lisa, a photographer, was commissioned by an outlet to photograph soccer (football) fields across Georgia. Thus, Irakli enlists the help of Levani, who just happens to be invisible, to travel to those fields and ask if anyone has seen her. Dry Leaf takes its name from a football term from Brazilian player Didi in the late 1950s. A ball kicked as a dry leaf can land unpredictably just as a dry leaf falling from a tree has no defined trajectory other than to eventually land somewhere.
Football is thematically essential, not only because it informed Irakli, Levani, and Lisa’s careers, but because of its prevalence in Georgia. Children Irakli speaks with will be able to tell him where the local (if overgrown and neglected) football field is/was, but they can’t tell him where a church might be. Football is present in a manner that highlights the absence of other things; not only Lisa, but also towns, former locals, the sustainability of the spaces that Irakli inhabits that feel they will become lost almost immediately after he leaves them.
Koberidze’s camera is curious. Not only in its distinctive obsolescence (a camera that cannot render a complete image) but also in where Koberidze trains it. Irakli will leave a scene but the camera lingers taking in the moment where an imperfect memory is formed. The maps Irakli and Levani use are imperfect too. Landscape shifts. A river or creek might rise and a bridge might be gone. A road might no longer lead anywhere. It’s a truth that Koberidze captures with one of Irakli’s conversations with two young boys. Their families relied on each other for bartering. One boy’s family used to grow grapes but harsh and extended winters have killed many of the vines for a few years.
Each interaction on the road is an aspect of a “dry leaf” in that chance governs who Irakli and Levani speak with. A family who are themselves passing through, or the chance that there will be children using an overgrown field. But that is the poetry of Dry Leaf – the moments of presence and the moments of absence. Koberidze’s camera searches but creates an image that the audience much also search within. What we see is never the “full” picture because the camera simply cannot render it the 144p resolution requires that the audience can choose between investigating the frame for familiar shapes that might illuminate more; or it can accept that cinema, in and of itself, is never a “full” picture.
Irakli speaks with an invisible boy about a football field that was and is no more. About where he kicks the ball. The conversation happened but not with the image produced. Koberidze plays with the artificiality of cinema while documenting an interaction without one of its participants. Yet, for all the artificiality, incompleteness, and playfully generated mystery, Dry Leaf is authentic. A dog might dominate the frame, or a cow, horse, donkey – a thistle of wildflowers. A world that Koberidze found on the road while working with his three-person crew. Visible, invisible, there and not there – a fundamental way of seeing that connects with the mind’s eye and the editing of memory. A postcard sent with faded letters. A fading polaroid. A moment both mundane and unique. Koberidze creates a conversation with all of the shifting moments of reality that exist for the individual and then become irrevocably “something else” when they form symbolic vestiges.
Dry Leaf is a film that asks for patience and for participation. It is a long film and one that doesn’t solve a mystery but speaks to the precarity of comprehension both within the artificial and the actual. Filmmaker and audience collude in a pact that binds them to a momentary whim of chance. Koberidze doesn’t pretend you’ll see it all, which is simultaneously radically honest and melancholy.
Director, writer, cinematographer, editor: Alexandre Koberidze
Cast: David Koberidze, Otar Nijaradze
Music, sound design: Giorgi Koberidze
Nadine Whitney spoke with Alexandre Koberidze courtesy of Plainwater Films. Listen to that interview via the player above, or by the links below:
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