A filmmaker returns to a small phone camera to blur reality and imagination in Dry Leaf
The Georgian director Alexandre Koberidze intentionally embraced technical limitations to shape the visual world of Dry Leaf. Rather than choosing the latest high-resolution tools, he photographed his three-hour travelogue with a decade-old mobile device: the Sony Ericsson W595, a handset originally released with a 3.20-megapixels camera and a capture rate of 15 frames per second. The result is an aesthetic that asks viewers to do more than passively register images: it invites a kind of visual labor, a reallocation of attention where blurred contours and pixelation become expressive choices.
Koberidze premiered Dry Leaf in Locarno and has taken the film on a long festival run ahead of its U.S. rollout; the film opens in theaters on March 20. At the heart of the story is a middle-aged father, Irakli (played by the director’s father, David), searching for his missing daughter Lisa, a photographer who disappeared while documenting football fields. He is accompanied by Levani, a co-worker whose presence in the frame is often hinted at rather than plainly shown. The film is equal parts road movie, urban portrait, and meditation on absence.
Koberidze’s choice of the Sony Ericsson W595 is both practical and philosophical. He has long photographed and shot with small cameras, and the W595’s limited resolution means the frame loses detail but gains atmosphere: shapes, color masses, and light take precedence over crisp facial recognition. This makes it possible to film strangers without fully exposing them, and it also supports a broader claim about cinema—what you choose to conceal is as meaningful as what you reveal. The director contrasts this with shooting on high-end gear, which he found often forces you to find new ways to hide information rather than let the image do the hiding naturally.
The film experiments with what Koberidze calls invisible characters, an idea that treats a person as present through framing, dialogue, and editing even when they are visually absent. This method came from an exercise in film school and evolved into a deliberate technique: a voice can belong to someone the camera never fully renders, or the camera can compose a shot as if an absent actor occupies it. The effect creates a constant tension between presence and non-presence, pushing the audience to imagine and assemble people and places from fragments. These compositional choices also freed the director to rely on intuition and spontaneity rather than rigid staging.
Conceiving characters as absent reshapes both image and sound strategies. Close-ups and distance work differently when faces lack sharp features; sound design must account for perceived proximity even when the frame reads as empty. Koberidze kept Levani in tighter framing more often, which makes his voice feel closer than other characters who are framed from afar. This interplay means the soundtrack, recorded and designed in part by the director’s brother Giorgi, becomes a crucial mediator between what the eye can’t catch and what the ear can confirm.
Collaboration with family is central to the film. David Koberidze embodies Irakli with a commitment that allowed the production to move across long stretches of Georgia, while Giorgi’s score and sound work gave the journey its oneiric lift. The director edited the film himself after extensive shooting blocks: summers and autumns filmed in two main blocks over consecutive years, accumulating well over a hundred shooting days. The editing process preserved a lot of improvisation and spontaneity; the script’s opening and ending survived intact, but much of what fills the journey emerged in the cutting room and through the rhythms Giorgi’s music introduced.
The film balances urban snapshots—Tbilisi street corners, statues, stray cats—with wide rural vistas and empty football fields. Koberidze assembled montages that behave like tactile memories of place: quick details that might vanish as the city changes. He chose some landmarks deliberately and captured many more through instinct, sometimes stopping because a scene felt like it would be gone tomorrow. That urgency infuses the film with elegiac notes: Dry Leaf can read like an attempt to preserve what is vulnerable in both landscape and everyday life.
Throughout, the film asks viewers to accept imperfection as an aesthetic principle. The grainy frames and wavering focus are not flaws to be corrected but tools to encourage a different kind of attention. If the director sometimes resists labeling his work as fairy tale, the film’s soft, dreamlike arcs and the presence of unseen figures nevertheless keep it close to that territory—an approach he describes as a desire to keep capturing small miracles in ordinary settings. With Dry Leaf arriving in theaters on March 20, audiences will soon be able to test that proposition for themselves: whether a low-res phone camera can widen what we think cinema can show and how it asks us to look.