Alexandre Koberidze’s whimsical love letter to his homeland of Georgia, the romance of football and the resilience of art made from nothing, solidifies his reputation as one of the globe’s most inventive arthouse voices.
Dry Leaf is a joy for devotees of the strange, singular and sometimes transcendent…a movie to ride shotgun alongside, with the windows down on a lazy trip to nowhere in particular.
Dry Leaf 2025
Khmeli potoli
In football, a “dry leaf” is a free kick where you can’t tell where the ball might land. Georgian director Alexandre Koberidze makes films with the same kind of faith in the chance magic of playing, and in the life force of art undimmed by an imposed economy of means.
When Lisa, a young photographer, goes incommunicado after leaving on a trip to photograph soccer fields in remote villages across Georgia, her father drives off in search of her, using a location list from her editor to stop off at pitches she may have visited. With him in the passenger seat is Lisa’s invisible friend, Levani, an inspired, peculiar detail that shows that cinema may need no cast, and human warmth burns brightest when there’s almost nothing left.
Voted one of the top ten films of 2025 worldwide in British magazine Sight & Sound’s yearly poll, Dry Leaf was shot exclusively on an old Sony Ericsson mobile phone. The lo-fi haze puts the act of looking centre-stage, in a light-stepping film full of the eccentric charm of untethered imagination.
- Carmen Gray