We can admire those who (brilliantly) craft entire feature films on iPhones, but the choice to shoot a three-hour feature with a Sony Ericsson––a device which ceased manufacturing in 2011––reaches an altogether different level of formal bravery. Alexandre Koberidze will follow 2021’s What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? with Dry Leaf, a feature premiering at this year’s Locarno Film Festival and for which we’re pleased to exclusively debut the first artifacted clip (no doubt reminding Millennials of cell phone footage from middle and high school).
Here’s the synopsis: “Sports photographer Lisa vanishes without warning, leaving behind a letter asking not to be found. 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. What they uncover are only fragments of Lisa’s presence––traces that become increasingly elusive the further they go. Just as they begin to lose hope, a mysterious event offers one final clue, drawing Irakli and Levani into the unknown and rekindling a faint glimmer of hope.”
As Koberidze says in his director’s statement: “In the late 1950s, Brazilian footballer Didi introduced a technique for kicking the ball called the ‘dry leaf.’ Just as a dry leaf falls from a tree and it’s impossible for the human eye to calculate where it will land, with this technique it’s impossible for the goalkeeper to predict the exact trajectory of the ball. The thing is, it remains a mystery for the shooter as well. Try to remember a leaf falling from above––how it changes direction and speed, sometimes dropping fast and straight to the ground, only for everything to shift suddenly. It begins to hover slowly and calmly before changing its path again, and so on, depending on the height, the wind, the humidity, and countless other factors we’re not even aware of. Even when it reaches the ground, the leaf’s journey isn’t over — a gust of wind or a little boy on his way to school might carry it to a different neighborhood, or someone might sweep it into a bag with thousands of other leaves and send it to a place where leaves are burned.”
Find clip and poster below:
