Dry Leaf: Alexandre Koberidze’s low-res road movie is a quietly political ode to the ordinary

Alexandre Koberidze is arguably the most radical Georgian filmmaker to emerge in the post-Soviet era. Dispensing with classical narrative structures, his work evokes Chris Marker in its essayistic drift, Krzysztof Kieślowski in its orchestration of chance and fate, and Otar Iosseliani in its loose, meandering construction. Most crucially, his cinema invokes Jacques Tati in the way it transforms seemingly ordinary environments into meticulously reconfigured visual spaces.

His first feature, Let the Summer Never Come Again (2017), employed lo-fi imagery in a flâneur-like portrait of youthful unease, urban alienation and the hollow fluidity of modern relationships. His second, What Do We See When We Look At the Sky? (2021), staged a phantasmagorical love story disrupted by curses and cruel twists of fate against the realistic backdrop of Kutaisi, Georgia’s second-largest city, which Koberidze fashions into a Rivettian urban hall of mirrors.

Dry Leaf retains the granular low-tech aesthetic of Koberidze’s debut, having been shot on a 2008 Sony Ericsson mobile phone. But it is a different creature: a road movie propelled by an Antonioni-esque futile search undertaken by a stoic father, Irakli (David Koberidze), whose photographer daughter Lisa has vanished while on a project documenting football pitches for a magazine. With him is Lisa’s friend and colleague Levani (Otar Nijaradze), who is heard throughout but never seen.

Little of what Koberidze presents serves any dramatic function. His film is populated by abandoned football pitches, stray dogs, grazing livestock, wandering horses; close-ups linger on swaying grass, pebbles and weathered fences. The beauty of these images is filtered through the limitations of the mobile camera which, incapable of fully capturing the breadth of the landscapes or nuances of light and colour, often resembles the gaze of an infant attempting to make sense of the world.

Where Tati challenged the act of looking itself, and where Béla Tarr, Andrei Tarkovsky and the traditions of slow cinema have persistently compelled audiences to observe, Koberidze seems more concerned with how we see – or perhaps with what we have gradually ceased to notice altogether.

Despite its three-hour-plus running time, the film rarely lingers on any place, face or object for more than a few seconds. Koberidze’s use of the Sony Ericsson camera encourages a childlike mode of perception: encountering mundane imagery with renewed curiosity, assembling meaning from fragments of a world whose wonder and material texture have been dulled by overexposure to slick digital images.

“To find new things, take the path you took yesterday,” the American naturalist John Burroughs wrote. The dry leaf of the title is among the most overlooked objects, easily crushed underfoot and discarded without thought. In Koberidze’s journey, the leaf becomes a metaphor for the exhaustion of seeing – a weariness, a kind of visual indolence incapable of recognising the vitality, mystery and magic of a world far less static than our numbed senses delude us into believing.

The film’s political dimension is equally difficult to dismiss. While Summer explored the aimlessness and emotional dislocation of post-Soviet Georgia, and Sky framed love as a fragile antidote to urban atomisation, Dry Leaf offers a subdued – almost clandestine – portrait of a nation suspended between the burdens of its Soviet inheritance and the failed promises of post-Soviet capitalism; between the utopian ideals of socialism and the seductive pull of identity-erasing neoliberalism.

Football fields – communal spaces and symbols of a fading collectivism – form a revealing motif. In one scene, one of the people Irakli talks to in his search for Lisa reflects: “There used to be a football field here, but they tore it down to build a hotel or something.” In a film haunted by disappearance, the vanishing of local football fields through gentrification becomes emblematic of a broader erosion of cultural memory – an emotional loss experienced by a nation, or more precisely by a political system, still uncertain of its identity and direction.

Koberidze’s deliberately minimal, if not elusive, narrative – with its invisible characters and seemingly disconnected digressions – can be understood as a rejection of conventional storytelling forms tied to the neoliberal logic the director has consistently resisted throughout his career.

However, the sense of loss permeating the film is counterbalanced not only by its quietly uplifting conclusion, but also by the possibility that our sluggish, incurious eyes might relearn what it means to see, to feel and to think. To truly look again.

► Dry Leaf will screen at the ICA, London, 18-25 June.