While filmmakers tout their usage of the latest and greatest technology through extensive aspect-ratio videos and infographics, leave it to one filmmaker to utilize a nearly two-decade-old phone to craft one of the most beautiful cinematic works of the year. Georgian director Alexandre Koberidze, returning after the wondrous Do We See When We Look At The Sky?, shot his latest feature Dry Leaf entirely on a 2008 Sony Ericsson W595. Ahead of a theatrical release beginning on March 20 at NYC’s Film at Lincoln Center with Alexandre Koberidze and Giorgi Koberidze in person, Cinema Guild has unveiled the first trailer.

Here’s the synopsis: “Lisa, a sports photographer, vanishes off into the greener pastures of the Georgian countryside, traces of her passing embedded in the landscape like clues. Her father, Irakli (David Koberidze), picks up her scent in the ochre foliage and communal soccer fields she documented for her last assignment. His search-and-rescue trip defies her wishes not to be followed. With a disembodied voice in his passenger seat, he embarks on a winding pastoral picaresque, marked by the recurring gaggles of adolescents, wild dogs, and oral histories he encounters along the way. Undulating between impressionistic reverie and subversive detective story, Irakli’s near-fruitless search invites us to see—with renewed eyes—the quotidian elements which constitute both cinema and life.”

Nirris Nagendrarajah said in our 2026 preview, “Languorous without becoming laborious, meditative without becoming meandering, abstract without becoming abstruse, Alexandre Koberidze’s Dry Leaf is a road movie unlike any other. It follows Irakli (David Koberidze), a father in search of his daughter, a sports photographer whose sudden disappearance is less of an enigma to solve than a vehicle for Koberidze’s imagination to serenely drift. Featuring Giorgi Koberidze’s charming, addictive score and shot on a Sony Ericsson, the fuzzy look of which transforms mundane landscapes into foreign-seeming textural images and hypnotic sequences, Dry Leaf, at 186 minutes, actively heightens our perception to its bucolic territory, its singular wavelength. It’s the kind of film where the destination is less important than the journey, where submission to its logic is more meaningful than a resistance, and where, like a vivid dream, its numinous sensations linger long after viewing. No matter the resolution, Koberidze has established himself as a modern enchanter.”

See the trailer below via Letterboxd.

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