Dry Leaf

Alexandre Koberidze studied directing at the German Film & TV Academy Berlin (DFFB) where he made several short films, and the feature-length film Let Summer Never Come Again, which won the Grand Prix at the FIDMarseille in 2017. His graduation film What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? premiered at Berlinale in 2021, and was selected at Entrevues. Dry Leaf is his third fiction feature. 

A word from the selection committee:
The world conjured by Dry Leaf is slightly misleading; the film, in any case, seems to have stepped out from a true-crime narrative: an investigation in the Georgian mountains - a father searching for his missing daughter -, shot in ultra-low resolution that evokes our contemporary distrust of corse digital grain, and scored with a Hitchcockian motif: a brisk, minimalist piano phrase that opens and punctuates part of the film. Yet Alexandre Koberidze chooses to withhold the more sensational  hallmarks of the detective serial, instead entrusting the story to a dialogue between a resolute father and the fractured memory of the missing girl’s friend. He builds suspense from a place of safety, channelling the heightened attentiveness of his investigators to summon ethereal presences, letting ghosts shimmer into life across a countryside transformed by wonder. And despite suggested by the title - taken from a type of free-kick where the ball drops vertically, like a dead leaf -, it is, in fact, the most playful of films. 

Pierre Guidez