Dry LeafA Place and an Absence: Alexandre Koberidze’s Dry Leaf Dylan Adamson January 2026 Feature Articles Issue 116 The final eight minutes of Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Eclisse (1961) present a horrifying vision: the film’s world bereft of its characters. When Piero (Alain Delon) and Vittoria (Monica Vitti) both fail to appear at their “usual spot” one evening, the film takes pains to record the particulars of this non-event. Without the lead players, the backdrop takes centre stage: a piece of wood floats in a barrel, sprinklers go off, streetlights signal the final transition to night. Far from tranquillity, the effect is one of terror. How delicate is the balance with which we hover atop a void; how brazen the indifference our inevitable disappearance will be met with. In his essay for the film’s Criterion release, Jonathan Rosenbaum expounds: “It’s almost as if Antonioni has extracted the essence of everyday street life that serves as a background throughout the picture, and once we’re presented with this essence in its undiluted form, it suddenly threatens and oppresses us. The implication is that behind every story there’s a place and an absence, a mystery and a profound uncertainty, waiting like a vampire at every moment to emerge and take over, to stop the story dead in its tracks. And if we combine this place and absence, this mystery and uncertainty into a single, irreducible entity, what we have is the modern world itself – the place where all of us live, and which most stories are designed to protect us from.” If cinema, per André Bazin, begins with the Ancient Egyptian practice of embalming the dead, when its indexical function is leveraged toward absence, as in L’Eclisse, the feeling is something akin to finding an empty tomb. A new narrative threatens the primacy of the old comforts. A new world willing and able to continue in our absence. Dry Leaf, the latest film from Georgian director Alexandre Koberidze, attempts something like stretching these eight minutes over three hours. L’Eclisse saves its revelation of the alienated state of things in modernised Italy for its conclusion; Koberidze’s Georgia seceded from the Soviet Union when the director was just five years old and has experienced only consistently inconsistent progress ever since. Alienation from modernity is his starting point, and the absences lurking around every corner in L’Eclisse are stated frankly in Dry Leaf – the revelation will be the way out. The film takes for its subject the father of a missing daughter. Portrayed by David Koberidze, the director’s own sire, Irakli ventures into the Georgian countryside on the trail of twenty-eight-year-old Lisa, a photojournalist who warned her parents that she would not see them again for some time. Her last known whereabouts are a series of rural soccer fields, many of which slated for redevelopment, that she was photographing on assignment for a sports magazine. Accompanying Irakli is Lisa’s friend and coworker Levani, who has some recollection of Lisa’s route. Equally important to this husk of a plot, Dry Leaf is shot on a 2008 Sony Ericsson mobile phone, the W595, whose 176×144 resolution is separated into a countable number of 16×16 pixel “DCT blocks” (roughly one hundred) which are compressed individually. Perhaps more important is Koberidze’s decision to render (the word is used liberally) a number of its characters, most notably Levani, as invisible, manifest only as empty screen space and voiceover. Dry Leaf Obstructing the viewer’s visual access to his films is not a new tactic for Koberidze. Let the Summer Never Come Again (2017), his debut feature about a queer romance unfolding in Tbilisi, also used the Ericsson to interrogate the boundaries between what could and could not be seen. Kelley Dong, writing for Reverse Shot, identified a plea for faith as a crucial piece of Koberidze’s address to his viewer: “With not a surreptitious glance to see or whisper to hear, the film deprives audiences of the cues on which we so often depend as proof of intimacy.” They discuss the privacy on which queer romance routinely hinges, as well as its resistance to surveillance. “The film’s lack thereof,” Dong continues, “challenges audiences to believe […] regardless of what can or cannot be perceived by the senses.” Koberidze’s angle, essentially, is to denaturalise the conditions by which we composite images in our minds in order to deconstrain the role our imagination can play. Our brains are accustomed to perceiving 24 frames per second as seamless movement; when we downshift to the Ericsson’s 15, of what further leaps is our imagination capable? Following Let the Summer Never Come Again was the similarly verbose (in title only) What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? (2021), for which Koberidze discarded his Ericsson in favour of a Super 16 and a modern HD video camera. But these supposedly clearer images belie similar suspicions with the visual world and the limits of our senses. After a simple meet cute on the street, an offscreen narrator informs us that the two lead characters have attracted the attention of the evil eye. The viewer is instructed to close their eyes for ten seconds, and when they are re-opened, the lead actors have been replaced. Unbeknownst to each other, the two lovers have been cursed to appear as entirely different people. Their reunion becomes a matter of faith, of a similar sort discussed by Dong, in what cannot be verified with one’s eyes. They get re-acquainted in their new bodies and are subsequently cast in a local film about couples. When the film is projected for them on 16mm, they appear in their original forms, understanding at last what they have long known by instinct. In this way, Koberidze’s film inverts Bazin’s dictum only to reify it in the conclusion. The link between sight and belief is challenged, and even broken, before being affirmed again at the last minute. When technology allows for everything to be visible, seeing and believing needn’t be separate categories; faith is all but redundant. Dry Leaf can be seen to combine the tendencies evident in these two preceding features: the technological limitations imposed in Let the Summer Never Come Again and the magical realist tricks of What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?. Paring away the viewer’s visual access to his film, the effect is less addition than multiplication by subtraction. This is summed up well, toward the end of the film, by one of the many soccer-playing children encountered by Irakli and Levani on their cross-country trip. “But there’s no football field anymore,” Irakli inquires with the boy, referring to a pitch torn down for a planned hotel. “Where do you play?” When the boy responds, not missing a beat, “Everywhere,” it’s as if Koberidze is speaking to the audience himself, an impression facilitated somewhat by the child’s invisibility: Irakli appears to be conversing with an empty bench with a soccer ball on it. Despite all that’s contained in the frame, the predominant feeling is of everything missing: several thousand pixels of detail, one character, and one soccer field. Antonioni’s absences have metastasised in Koberidze’s Georgia, but these disappearances prompt reappearances in some internal space belonging to the viewer, be it memory or imagination, where their shapes are at once non-existent and infinite. In a semi-literal sense, Koberidze’s film seems to shiver on this boundary. Among the most notable features of the Ericsson footage is its refresh rate: every few seconds, the DCT blocks re-arrange themselves to respond to movement or changing light. As such, the viewer is confronted with the digital image’s inherent instability – the gap between image and reality, seeing and believing – several times per minute, and this sensation is accentuated by Koberidze’s preference for long and static takes. The threat of disappearance is negotiated over and over again in a single shot. Sometimes, as in one of the many shots of tall grass swaying in the wind, the effect recalls glitch art, or a muddy impasto, with the natural movement of the grass not quite blurring with the segmented refreshing of the pixels. Elsewhere, in the many utterly still shots of empty soccer fields, the image seems to shudder from the strain required to remain upright, as if the mere act of not disappearing were itself a continual effort. In his review for Reverse Shot, Lawrence Garcia remarks “it’s as if the image itself has a kind of heartbeat.” In these moments, it feels more like palpitations. Dry Leaf In Dry Leaf, Koberidze allows this threat of disappearance to spill from form to text. Beyond the narrative disruption caused by Lisa’s going missing, Levani’s invisibility is the crucial piece, standing in as it does for the potential invisibility of every character. This is stated quite early in the film, and never mentioned explicitly again. “Levani,” the narrator’s voice announces while the camera turns to an empty parking lot, “like many others in this film’s reality, is invisible. Right now, for instance, there are two people in the frame, but they can’t be seen.” For a film orbiting a missing person, the potential for invisibility is a rather essential point. Following Levani’s hazy memories of the map he charted with Lisa, Irakli and his invisible travel companion visit some remote soccer fields. We see Irakli speaking with people around the pitch, visible or invisible, before he looks out into the middle distance (focal points are a foregone concern with the Ericsson) and for thirty seconds or so, we simply watch the foliage quiver through the primitive display. Perhaps that’s really all there is to the image, though perhaps, beneath its pixelated hodgepodge, there’s a soccer field full of invisible children, or Lisa, the object of his search, as invisible to him as Levani is to us. Dry Leaf’s centrifugal disappearance brings to mind another Antonioni classic, L’Avventura (1960). Not only is Irakli’s search not animated by urgency in any form, the conditions of Lisa’s disappearance are aestheticised to the point of fetish. Writing in MUBI Notebook about the film, Phil Coldiron mused, “While I assume Koberidze knows Hito Seyterl’s “In Defense of the Poor Image” by heart, his film’s sentimentality gives it a new aspect.” The Ericsson camera introduces a threat of nothingness overbearing every scene, but it’s also a source of fascination for Koberidze. Everything in this film, save perhaps for the ever-sturdy Irakli, shivers on the brink of oblivion, and the pervasive horror that Koberidze glimpses therein is mirrored by a state of enrapturement before these mounting catastrophes. I’m reminded of the novels of W.G. Sebald, in which, again and again, the narrator arrives at some dilapidated palace, and his ensuant flood of memories of the building’s former grandeur is thoroughly perfumed with the odour of its impending demise. Yet Dry Leaf’s dubious mission is to wring some hope from this dire state of affairs. Irakli is a teacher, and in one of the few glimpses of his classroom, he draws a line on the chalkboard. “This is a line,” he tells his class. “For most people, there’s nothing interesting about it. But for us, lines have a crucial meaning.” The bell rings; the subject of his class remains a mystery. The world of Dry Leaf is not one totally given over to invisibility, at least not yet. After the class, Irakli instructs one of his students to care for a dog that he has been feeding at a local park. He traces the route for her: “To the right of the palace, there’s a small path down and a little courtyard. That’s where a beautiful, smart dog named Panda lives.” The coordinates are faint, fading still, leading to something as transient as a stray dog, but he draws the line all the same. Dry Leaf’s prophetic hope is frequently couched in these cute terms, aiming for something like the inverse of grandiosity. The metaphor is visualised again later, when Irakli watches a young boy (visible) cross a single plank bridge on his bicycle to get to a soccer pitch. Gone is the heart-pounding adrenaline of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Le salaire de la peur (The Wages of Fear, 1953), but the stakes feel no less existential. Koberidze tends to these dubious and rickety paths with the delicate hand of the miniaturist. “Thank god,” the narrator muses at the very end, “that there are still roads.” What has already disappeared must be imagined, what remains must be fastidiously cared for. Between viewer and film, it’s difficult, but not totally impossible, to form a straight line out of an ever-shifting array of jagged pixels. Among other things, Dry Leaf is about the changing face of Georgia – racked, as everywhere else, by the relentless neoliberal drive to development alongside the darker forces of a nascent fascism. Koberidze highlights the primacy of football in this culture, but it’s also worth mentioning that, in 2024, the country elected (the legitimacy of the results is disputed) former Manchester City striker-turned-far-right nationalist Mikheil Kavelashvili to the office of the presidency. The line that Dry Leaf seeks to draw from Georgia’s idyllic past to a liveable future for the country is not a thick one, nor a straight one, nor an especially legible one. Indeed, connecting this sparse arrangement of dots will require at least as much imagination as memory. If our sight is to be constrained to a hundred or so DCT blocks, our vision must be willing to extend further. Who is to say that what appears absent is not merely invisible instead? There are soccer fields everywhere for those with eyes to see them.
