Closing Film: Dry Leaf
Georgia / Germany
3h 6'
- Synopsis
- Curatorial presentation
Sports photographer Lisa vanishes without warning. She was last seen photographing rural football fields in remote Georgian villages. Her father, Irakli, unable to accept her disappearance, sets out on a journey to find her. He teams up with Levani, Lisa’s enigmatic best friend, and together they travel across the countryside, retracing her steps through quiet villages, meeting kind strangers, and speaking with children playing football along the way.
After his sublime What Do We See When We Look At The Sky, Alexandre Koberidze returns in DRY LEAF to his lo-fi roots, shooting an entire film of 3 hours on the camera of a 2009 Sony Ericsson phone. As “limited” and almost rudimentary as this digital camera may seem at first, Koberidze proves that you can achieve a real masterpiece without the need to mobilise immense and extractive resources, without using sophisticated and expensive equipment or huge film crews — here, the main actor is his own father, and the secondary character is, quite literally, invisible. All that is needed is imagination and thoroughness, and a lyrical gaze capable of infusing even a tiny group of pixels with emotion and tenderness. (Flavia Dima)
