‘Dry Leaf’ Locarno Review: A Disappearance, A Road Trip, A Nation

Of all Brazil’s contributions to world football, one of the most famous is the folha seca. Introduced in the 1950s by the great Didi, the technique produces a sudden, dramatic rise and dip in the ball’s trajectory — almost impossible for a goalkeeper to predict or stop. Georgian filmmaker Alexandre Koberidze, the football-loving director of What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?, uses the term as a metaphor for the title of his new film, Dry Leaf. The reference is more poetic than literal, evoking the meandering course of this river-like movie and the equally unpredictable path of its own production, which, in a sense, drifted across Georgia with the same wayward logic.

Football, in turn, plays a significant (symbolic yet central) role in the plot of Dry Leaf. It begins when Lisa, a photographer, vanishes without a trace. Her father, Irakli (David Koberidze), starts looking into her disappearance. The last thing he knows is that, while working for a magazine, Lisa had been traveling around the country photographing football fields. He doesn’t seem overly worried — Lisa has a habit of “disappearing” for stretches, and at 28 she’s hardly a child — but he decides to try retracing her steps.

For that, he turns to Levani, a colleague and friend of Lisa’s who remembers some of the places she visited. Though his recollection is fuzzy, he agrees to come along. That’s when the film fully lays its cards on the table. From the outset — the low-quality image (the movie looks like a worn VHS tape), the lushly overblown music, the peculiar framing (actors kept at a distance, dialogue scenes showing only one character at a time) — it’s clear that Koberidze rejects conventional form. But his boldest gambit is Levani himself, who, as the occasional voiceover explains, is invisible. We hear him, but we never see him.

And so Irakli and “Levani” set off by car, moving from village to village in a similar routine: they arrive, ask where the football field is (sometimes just a dusty patch of ground, sometimes a more formal pitch), locals invariably give the same direction — “keep going straight to the end of the road and you’ll find it” — and upon arrival, they usually find kids playing. Irakli shows them a photo of Lisa, asks if they’ve seen her; the answer is always no.

Dry Leaf uses this structure as a kind of poetic travelogue through Georgia’s rural towns — meeting locals (none of them professional actors), visiting small fields where young boys dream of becoming the next Kvaratskhelia, talking with them, wandering around, getting back in the car and moving on. The journey unfolds against a backdrop of greenery, stray dogs wandering freely, lethargic neighbors, casual conversations, and a provincial languor untouched by the supposed urgency of the search.

Its three hours pass in this gentle, unhurried way — calm, observational, and perhaps, for some, excessive. Yet it remains quietly engrossing, less for the mystery of what happened to Lisa (at times, the search seems to vanish as a goal) than for the curiosity of how Koberidze will frame or stage each new encounter, particularly in the film’s second half.

What proves less convincing is the choice of such low-resolution digital format. At times, its blurry softness produces intriguing images; at others, it grows monotonous and aesthetically flat, resembling a lo-fi version of Abbas Kiarostami’s winding road films. One can grasp the reasoning — clearly an aesthetic decision rather than a budgetary one, likely to avoid any kind of “picturesque postcard” view of the countryside — but even so, over the film’s length, the effect can be wearying.

Koberidze continues to show himself as a director with a distinctly personal vision, both in his staging — blending a kind of naturalism with touches of magical realism — and in his use of music and narrative structure. Like the Brazilian free kick that inspired its title, Dry Leaf is a journey with an uncertain trajectory: warm, gentle, at times humorous, and free of any real darkness despite centering on a disappearance. Along the way, the filmmaker and his small crew discover a country, its people, and their shared love for football. After all, as the villagers say, just follow the road to the end — there’s bound to be a pitch waiting there.